Over at her Dynamist blog, Virginia Postrel takes some time out to bitch slap Reason — the magazine she used to edit — for trying to use Ron Paul as a symbol of libertarianism rising, while ignoring his dark side:

I did not mean to criticize the essentially apolitical people like him and his wife [Ron Paul supporters] who heard some good things from Paul and decided to support him. …

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals. (Note that by “cosmopolitan” I do not mean “Jewish.” I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul’s record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.

For my own part, I’ve been more than skeptical of the Ron Paul phenomenon from the beginning — and have argued that it has next to nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with anti-war populism mixed with conspiracy theory-ism — but I’ve also, like Virginia, probably not invested enough energy in sounding the alarm.

Like Virginia, I disagree with Ron Paul on the war and on immigration, and I’ve never considered him the “face of libertarianism.” To many people, though, that’s probably exactly what he is. It’s a shame so many had to be taken in and that his bat-shittery will tarnish the name of an otherwise respectable strain of political philosophy.

So, to those who were taken in, some words of advice going forward. Now, perhaps I’m just ultra-sensitive to this stuff as a Jew, but when you hear a lot of talk from a group of people about “international bankers”: RUN THE OTHER FUCKING DIRECTION!!!

This was all more than foreseeable and foreseen.