Start here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGyhlNY0y1k
Then you can check out what Michelle Malkin has to say about your St Paul here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/05/19/trutheriness-and-ron-paul/
BTW, as the courts ruled in the “Westmoreland” case decades ago, public figures and politicians cannot claim libel or slander. Therefore that demented tinfoil-hat-wearing kook known as Ron Paul is fair game.
As you’ve been told countless times by dozens of FReepers, libertarians are NOT conservatives. So take your Paultard propaganda to those featherbrained imbeciles who are cranially vacant enough to buy it. Conservatives know about Paul’s line of bovine scatology and want nothing to do with it or him.
Wow!!! Is that the best you have e.g. that he called for an investigation of 9-11?! Please note that neither you nor your “links” provided a quotation from Paul claiming that the U.S. government was behind 9-11. In fact, the youtube showed him yet again stating that Bin Laden did it. I hope you never get on a jury!
This is close but not quite correct. Review New York Times v Sullivan, the key case of modern libel law.
The four categories of people, as far as modern libel law is concerned, are public officials, public figures, and limited public figures, all contrasted with private persons. It is difficult but not impossible for a public official or public figure to win a libel lawsuit. It is considerably easier for a person who is not in the public eye to do so.
The concept is that public officials should not be able to use the court system to intimidate press criticism, and other people in the public eye such as actors and prominent businessmen have other ways to convey their response to attacks in the press.
But what about situations where a newspaper prints something which is factually wrong?
Under New York Times v Sullivan and subsequent case law, a public official or public figure must not only show that the newspaper was factually wrong but also that it acted with both actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth. Those two higher tests don't need to be met by private parties.
The details get extremely complicated, but the short version is that a public official or public figure can't go to court and sue a newspaper because of a factual error as long as the newspaper wasn't acting maliciously toward its target and had procedures in place to prevent such errors. Mistakes happen, especially in articles written on deadline, and a newspaper shouldn't be hauled into court based on a technicality if no malicious intent or reckless disregard for the truth can be shown.
This is very different from the laws of countries like Britain and France which to some extent restrict the ability of the press to intrude into the “privacy” of government officials. That's part of how our current International Monetary Fund sex scandal with Dominique Strauss-Kahn happened; the French press knew about the history of the moral conduct of the man accused but didn't cover it, so a bit of review of how we got to our current American libel laws could help.
Truth is now an absolute defense against libel, but that was not always the case. A colonial-era precedent underlies our modern First Amendment; a newspaper owner was thrown into jail for months for printing accurate attacks on the colonial governor and then released because the jury refused to follow existing law and convict him. Because of that case, basically you can say anything about anyone as long as you can prove it's true.
Prior English law said that even if something printed was true, if it caused a government official to fall into disrepute, it was criminal libel and the person could be not only fined but also jailed on the grounds that it caused the general public to disrespect the institutions of government. John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, was regularly attacking Gov. William Cosby (probably on behalf of behind-the-scenes political opponents of the governor), was charged with seditious libel, but was acquitted in 1735 because the jury refused to follow the law at the time.
A corollary of this principle that truth is an absolute defense against libel is that if something can't be proven to be true or false, it can't be libelous. That's why opinion is protected. You have every right to call Ron Paul a “demented tinfoil-hat-wearing kook” because that's a statement of opinion, not an assertion of fact; no reasonable person would believe you are actually asserting that Paul's headgear is made of tinfoil, and criticism based solely on opinion and not factual assertions is not libelous, though all facts stated have to be true.
I'm writing this because the issues involved in libel law are far more important than the subject of this thread. In an internet era, anyone posting on the internet about this type of thing needs to understand libel law in ways that for a prior generation only the professional media needed to know.