Columnist-to-the-World Mark Steyn and I chat on air almost every week. The transcript of those interviews are always posted, both at HughHewitt.com and SteynOnline.com. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from yesterday’s conversation about Ron Paul, which begins as I play a tape of a question asked of the would-be Iowa upset winner about 9/11:
Q: Okay, and one more question. Why don’t you come out and tell the truth about 9/11?
RP: Well, I can’t handle the controversy. I have the IMF, the Federal Reserve to deal with, the IRS to deal with, because no, I just have more, too many things on my plate, because I just have too much to do.
HH: “Why won’t you come out on 9/11? Ron Paul?” He has too much controversy, Mark Steyn, too many things on his plate. What do you think about that?
MS: Yeah, I mean, that is a very cowardly answer. One of the rare occasions on which I’ve applauded Bill Clinton was 2008, four years ago. He was in Keene, New Hampshire, and some Ron Paul supporter asked him about the truth about 9/11 being an inside job. And Clinton slapped that guy down, as he well should have. This, by the way, is not an irrelevant thing, because it gets to the heart, to the most disfiguring aspect of Ron Paul’s campaign, leaving aside his unpleasantness to Michele Bachmann the other night, and all the rest of it, which is this stunted parochialism. Let’s say, for a moment, that 9/11 was an inside job. Does that also mean, then, that the Bali nightclub bombing was an inside job, that the Madrid train bombings was an inside job, that the Beslan school shootings were an inside job, that the London Tube bombings were an inside job? Because in that case, that’s one hell of a sum to be hiding somewhere within the darkest recesses of Dick Cheney’s non-specific line items. So we’re getting here into what is the problem with Ron Paul, which is the sheer stupid, half-witted parochialism of his view of what’s going on out in the planet. And that’s why this is so pathetic. This is a kind of utopian isolationism that fantasists on the right have embraced. And at its darkest side, it meets the left coming round the other way in 9/11 truther conspiracy theories.