On Thursday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough said, “There is always a strain of anti-Semitism” that exists at rallies for Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
“There is a tension that we need to explain here among Ron Paul supporters,” Scarborough said. “There are some who will embrace his domestic agenda, embrace the idea of a smaller government, even if they don’t agree with everything. And they have been saying for some time, with their eyes rolled, [that they are concerned] about foreign policy. But also, … [they] go away from an event saying there is always a strain of anti-Semitism — I’ve never heard the racism part, but a strain of anti-Semitism there.”
As Paul has climbed in the Republican presidential nomination polls, he has come under increasing media scrutiny, particularly for racist, homophobic and anti-Semetic language made in his organization’s newsletters from the early 1990s.
Rev. Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” said that Paul should get out in front of these charges and deal with them.
“Well, I think when you read the statements in his name, the problem is that you’re not dealing with someone that has dealt with [the controversy] in a forthright manner,” Sharpton said.
“You can say something and later say, ‘I shouldn’t have said it, I apologize.’ You can say something and say it was a misunderstanding. All of us have gone through that,” he continued. “But you can’t say something and then turn around and act as though you didn’t know it was said; you don’t know you benefited from it after, as John [Heilemann] said, you said, ‘Yes, I wrote some of it.’
“It’s ambiguous what [Paul] wrote, and [he doesn’t] clarify that and [he gets] angry when people ask about it,” Sharpton concluded. “That’s the danger zone that he’s in.”
Watch:
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(h/t Business Insider)