Brookhiser on the Ron Paul Revelations and "Further Right World"

I found this piece to be insightful, charitable and concise.

If you live in Further Right World, you may well believe that the Constitution was a kind of NATO between the states. I think that is demonstrably wrong, but it is an honorable view (Jefferson, in some moods, professed it).

Close by that view is the view that the slave power was the historic defender of liberty, which I think is both wrong and wicked (Jefferson, in his old age, found himself driven to it).

Many inhabitants of Further Right World are also gold bugs. That may be a mistaken belief, but again it is honorable. Gold buggery goes off the rails when it breeds an unhealthy suspicion of central banks. ("The necessary secrecy of [bankers'] transactions gives unlimited scope to imagination to infer that something is, or may be wrong"—Alexander Hamilton, "Report on a National Bank," 1790). I was startled, the first time I read Lysander Spooner—and if you have spent any time in Further Right World, you will know exactly who that is—to find a little blast at the Rothschilds.

Ron Paul clearly holds the honorable views mentioned above, and everyone who knows him testifies that he does not hold the wicked ones. But it requires eternal vigilance in Further Right World to keep the two apart, and he has not exercised it.

Hat tip Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan, a Paul supporter, admits embarrassment for not knowing about the newsletters and of course was offended by all the anti-gay stuff which I'll admit I found funny and sounded like it was ripped off from Ann Coulter. But then again, maybe I'm a citizen of "Further Guy World".