Ron Paul's Negative Ad Blitz

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The combined effect of Ron Paul's campaign commercials and the attacks ads released by his supporters is making for a blistering day of negative campaigning. From South Carolina to New Hampshire, ads targeting everyone from Mitt Romney to Rick Santorum to Rick Perry to John Huntsman are blanketing the states.

In South Carolina, CNN reports that Paul's campaign is "flooding ... mailboxes with a letter calling Newt Gingrich a 'counterfeit conservative.'" The five-page mailing also rips Perry's immigration record, Mitt Romney's abortion volte-face and his advocacy for "state-run health care." But Gingrich's treatment is by far the worst:

Newt Gingrich has a long record of liberal appeasement, flip-flopping on key issues, and lobbying for insider millions. I have rarely seen a candidate who represents so much of what is wrong with Washington and what is wrong with our political system.

On a humorous note, Paul's super PAC Endorse Liberty has unveiled a slew of satirical web videos featuring actors impersonating Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Perry, reports The Washington Post. The most bruising impersonation is of Santorum who's depicted as a trigger-happy war-monger. “Any person, place or thing — any noun, really — that starts with an ‘I’ sound is an enemy to American Exceptionalism and should be nuked,” the fake Santorum says. “That means you, Ikea. You’re next.” Of the four ads, the impersonation for Romney, with its stop-and-start cadence and head bobbing, is probably the most dead-on. (See all four here)

On an uglier note, a group of Ron Paul supporters (or Ron Paul saboteurs) released an ad attacking Huntsman on Thursday that both Huntsman and Paul have denounced today. Of the series of cheap shots, the ad takes aim at Huntsman's adopted daughter:

The web ad from the group, New Hampshire Liberty 4 Ron Paul, takes aim at Huntsman's ambassadorship in China, his ability to speak Mandarin, and even his adopted daughter, Gracie Mei, who is Chinese. The spot closes with an image of Huntsman dressed as China's communist leader Mao Zedong.

The ad was created by an outfit called "New Hampshire Liberty 4 Paul" but as The Huffington Post's Sam Stein notes "The group has no other discernable online presence, the YouTube account was created on Jan. 4, and has posted only the single video -- all of which points to some ad hoc effort and not an actual campaign product."

In an interview with CNN, Paul denounced the ad. "Of course I disavow him and he shouldn't do it, because you have one out of how many, a couple hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, I don't know how many people we have, because one does that, to bring that up just doesn't sound like a fair thing to do," he said. "Of course I denounce it, I couldn't even hear it, haven't looked at it, but people do that, and they do it in all campaigns."

Then of course there was the errant tweet sent out from Ron Paul's Twitter account during the night of the Iowa caucuses, which rather humorously bashed Huntsman's meager performance.

@JonHuntsman we found your one Iowa voter, he's in Linn precinct 5 you might want to call him and say thanks.
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) January 4, 2012

Though some have described Paul's quixotic run for the presidency as a mere soapbox to air his libertarian views, it's clear he's willing to get in the mud and take on his opponents like any other serious campaign for the White House.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”