A resolution for 2012: Don’t read opinion pieces by knee-jerk Obama supporters who profess to be liberals. Their stuff is as propagandistic as the garbage that streams from the right in support of Newt and Mitt and the dimmer Republican presidential wannabes.

No more Joe Conason, for example, whose recent rabid attack on libertarian eccentric Ron Paul was off-target and manifestly unfair:

The latest evidence of simmering racial resentment on the American political fringe showed up Monday in a Facebook post by a California man who urged the assassination of the president and his two daughters in obscene, racist language. Aside from the Secret Service, there was little reason for most of us to pay attention to this sick boob—except that he was identified as a local political leader of the tea party and an avid supporter of Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who now seems likely to place first in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

To those who have followed Paul’s long career as a failed presidential candidate—these campaigns have become a family business—the appearance of yet another racist nut job in his orbit is scarcely news. The newsletters that earned millions of dollars for him from gullible subscribers over the decades were often soiled with vile invectives against blacks and other minorities…

Very classy stuff, worthy of Karl Rove. Some ugly-minded wing-nut who calls himself a Paul supporter urges a heinous crime, and Conason immediately smears Paul with the guilt-by-association argument. As further evidence that Paul and the nut are on the same page, Conason mentions racist language in newsletters from which Paul made money. Case closed.

The trouble with guys such as Conason is they can’t imagine a world where the good guys often aren’t very good and the bad guys sometimes have a few redeeming features. Paul appears to be more competent and honest than the other Republicans, and he makes more sense than Obama on many issues.

Clarification: I would never vote for Ron Paul and disagree with much of what he purports to believe in, although I love watching the other Republican candidates squirm at Paul’s lucid putdowns of the Federal Reserve and American imperialism. (Obama would squirm, too, if he had to debate Paul on these issues.)

The politicians whose ideas appeal to me, and to many other disillusioned Dems, include people like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are as independent as Paul but don’t share his right-wing views on issues such as abortion. But I’m sure Conason would only smirk at those two, because neither would have anything to do with the corrupt Democratic machine that elected the faux-Democrat Obama.