Can anyone but the most credulous Ronulans on the face of the earth buy the spin that Ron Paul a) doesn’t know who wrote his newsletter, b) he can’t find out who wrote it and that c) he never even read it for all those years? That’s his defense. He even compared it to a magazine owner who doesn’t know everything that goes into the magazines he publishes, which is absurd. His newsletter wasn’t a sprawling, international operation with bureaus stretching from Texas to Moscow to Beijing, Baghdad and beyond: It was a newsletter put together with desktop publishing software by someone that he, Ron Paul, hired to put it together. Its purpose was to put Ron Paul’s world view out there for his fans to read. If the Ron Paul newsletter wasn’t representing the Ron Paul world view, what was its purpose? I’m sure the Paul supporters that we have around here will do their absolute best to defend and explain this, but Paul’s spin really is an insult to their and everyone else’s intelligence. It makes no sense from any angle.

If his spin is true, then take it for what it is: Ron Paul is so incompetent that he’s not only not fit to run the executive branch or a Dairy Queen, he’s not even fit to write a check. That is what he was doing all those years, writing checks to people who were publishing nonsense in his name, people he can’t identify now who he now claims were writing things that he didn’t even believe. But he was such a hands-off guy that he never bothered to take an editorial look at what they were writing, across a decade. Talk about an easy boss.

On the other hand, if his spin is not true, then he’s lying now and he really did believe all that back when it was published and may still believe it. And if he’s lying, he’s not quite the principled patriot that his fans believe he is.

But do you know what irks me most about this interview? It’s the way Wolf Blitzer just lets Paul sandbag him with long, irrelevant answers. He lets Paul rant on and on about what a great, tolerant guy he is, and never once brings up any of the angles I brought up in my post about Paul’s newsletters yesterday — the association with Truthers, the donation from Stormfront, any of it. Blitzer did a terrible job in this interview, and whiffed on a chance to put Paul out of the race once and for all. He left that job to the other GOP candidates in tonight’s debate, and I wonder if he didn’t do that intentionally.