Ron Paul newsletters: Republican candidate can't keep story straight

In his latest attempt to deflect criticism for racially insensitive newsletters written in the first person and signed with his name in the 1980s and '90s, Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul now says, "only eight to ten sentences were offensive."

While Paul wants the public to know that he didn't write the newsletters and didn't see what was in the newsletters and certainly not the eight to 10 racist parts, he is now is accepting "some responsibility" for the offensive portions which he wants us to believe don't represent what he actually believes.

"These were sentences that were put in, I think it was a total of eight or 10 sentences and it was bad stuff, it wasn't a reflection of my views at all...So it got in the letter. I think it was terrible, it was tragic and, you know, I had some responsibility because the [letter went out under my name]," said Paul recently.

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Paul wants to create distance between his 2012 campaign and the 20-year-old newsletters but the problem is that the newsletters helped to cultivate his very libertarian audience. That is all well and good but not having written the newsletters with his own pen doesn't mean he shouldn't have to answer sufficiently for the content.

The newsletter story is newsworthy not only because of inflammatory quotes such as, "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal" and calling legendary former Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, "Barbara Morondon" describing her as the "archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism" (For those keeping count: That's two) but because of Paul's inadequate and ever changing responses to recent attention given to the newsletters.

Essentially, Ron Paul is going with what The Atlantic's Ta-nehisi Coates called, "the Shaggy defense" after the popular song "It Wasn't Me" where even after the mounting evidence and proof a boyfriend claims all of the evidence is wrong and he's not really cheating.