Racist Ron Paul Newsletters Uncovered

Reply for Ron Paul: "Ouch!" This is hardly the news that the Paul camp needs before Super Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A series of newsletters in the name of GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul contain several racist remarks -- including one that says order was restored to Los Angeles after the 1992 riots when blacks went "to pick up their welfare checks."

CNN recently obtained the newsletters -- written in the 1990s and one from the late 1980s -- after a report was published about their existence in The New Republic.

None of the newsletters CNN found says who wrote them, but each was published under Paul's name between his stints as a U.S. congressman from Texas. Paul told CNN's "The Situation Room" Thursday that he didn't write any of the offensive articles and has "no idea" who did.

"When you bring this question up, you're really saying, 'You're a racist' or 'Are you a racist?' And the answer is, 'No, I'm not a racist,'" he said.

Paul said he had never even read the articles with the racist comments.

"I do repudiate everything that is written along those lines," he said, adding he wanted to "make sure everybody knew where I stood on this position because it's obviously wrong."

The controversial newsletters include rants against the Israeli lobby, gays, AIDS victims and Martin Luther King Jr. -- described as a "pro-Communist philanderer." One newsletter, from June 1992, right after the LA riots, says "order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks."

Another says, "The criminals who terrorize our cities -- in riots and on every non-riot day -- are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to 'fight the power,' to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible."

In some excerpts, the reader may be led to believe the words are indeed from Paul, a resident of Lake Jackson, Texas. In the "Ron Paul Political Report" from October 1992, the writer describes carjacking as the "hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos." (H/T - CNN)

Now, before all of the Ron Paul backers flood the comments with hate mail, let me be clear: I want to give Paul the benefit of the doubt. I really do. Paul claims he didn't write the newsletters or even read them, but they were published under his name. So, isn't it reasonable to think that he would have some knowledge of the newsletters and their contents?

Either way, it does not bode well for an already tenuous Presidential campaign.