If you follow some political people on Twitter, you’ll know that there is a bit of a scandal involving Rand Paul and his new media director, Jack Hunter. The Free Beacon reported yesterday that Hunter has a history of inflammatory statements going back from his days as a radio shock jock in Charleston, South Carolina.
A piece appeared in Commentary magazine yesterday by Seth Mandel that responded to the scandal. The piece started out raising (legitimate) concerns with how Rand Paul has handled issues concerning race and who he surrounds himself with.
Unfortunately, it descended into some inflammatory rhetoric self.
During the George W. Bush years, one surefire way to tell someone had a conspiratorial view of foreign policy was if they would whine wild-eyed about the Jewish “neocons” who supposedly steered American foreign policy according to Israel’s wishes. The far left and Ron Paul’s followers on the right were particularly obsessed with this idea, and they retained this psychosis long after Bush left office. The inane among them still talk this way, and apparently that category includes Hunter–the man who speaks for Rand Paul’s social media apparatus:
It should go without saying that this is a silly way for a United States senator to talk, not least because Americans would like to believe their representatives are above this sort of thing. But I suppose it’s nice to know at least that the voice behind this asininity is Hunter’s, not Paul’s. But if the best thing you can say about Paul in this regard is that he hired a dim neoconfederate clown to speak for him, that doesn’t reflect all too well on Paul, does it?
Unfortunately, this is an attempt to revive the slur that “neo-con” is a code word for Jew. If that were the case, our own Anna Morris would be guilty of accusing President Obama of being a Kenyan-Muslim-Jew.
For more info, here’s a piece by the late Irving Kristol himself that defines neoconservatism.
In all seriousness, playing the race/religious card is wrong when the left does it and it’s wrong when the right does it as well.