For chrissake. Ron Paul’s excuse for writing lots of racist and nutball crap in his newsletters is that he didn’t write the newsletters and doesn’t know who did.1 Now Newt Gingrich has decided this is such a peachy excuse that he’s going to use it too:
The Wall Street Journal reports today on a memo from April 2006 on the website of Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation. In the memo, filed under the “Newt Notes” column and written in the first person, Gingrich calls RomneyCare the “most exciting development of the past few weeks” and says he “agree[s] strongly” with the “principle” of the individual mandate….These days the mandate, and by extension RomneyCare, are treif2 in GOP orthodoxy. What to do, then, about this memo?
[Gingrich spokesman R.C.] Hammond said the Newt Notes essay wasn’t written by Mr. Gingrich himself.
I would like to announce for the record that I have been paying various local high school students to write most of this blog for the past ten years. I never asked for their names and paid them under the table by giving them answers to SAT questions, so I don’t know who they are. I assume this brings an end to questions about some of the unfortunate posts written here, which I disavow completely. As of now, it’s old news. Move along, please.
1Actually, “doesn’t know” should be rendered in scare quotes. Paul is lying. He knows perfectly well who wrote this stuff.
2adj. Judaism ritually unfit to be eaten; not kosher.
