Ron Paul 2012

Well, at least according to a straw poll at CPAC.

From the Christian Science Monitor

Full article here.

It does raise an interesting question: who will be floated for office by the Republicans?

CPAC is pretty meaningless when it comes to who will and won't be the nominee.

I think we're looking at a third party candidate or two this time.

Where have you gone, Dwight D. Eisenhower?

I'm still crossing my fingers:




For only $22? I might just buy one.

I'd take Richard Nixon or the Elder Bush at this point.

Dan Quayle at his worst was smarter than every attendee at CPAC at their best, combined.

Fuck that guy who agrees with me on the issues!

No, you miss understand. The American conservative movement has always had a strong intellectual base to it. Ron Paul and the Tea Party is the opposite of that. It is an emotional movement that denounces intelligence. The Conservatives affair with libertarianism will end in a very Fatal Attraction type way. And sadly, yes, there will be death involved.

Huh? Ron Paul is about as intellectual as a politician could be. He's a pretty strict libertarian and votes against the Republicans all the time, based on his strict interpretation of the Constitution. He may have started the Tea Party, but what it is now has nothing to do with him.

The people who booed aren't interested in all that bothersome thinking, they're interested in shouting 'Communist' and 'Nazi' and supporting policies that favor perpetual foreign venture wars, a police state at home, and transforming the US into a theocracy. They basically oppose libertarianism, so they booed the libertarian. Duh.

the conservative movement, as a whole, has no idea what it wants.

Haw haw. As a whole, no, but each faction does, and most of those seem to be theocrats, fascists, and war-mongers, not libertarians. From what I've read, a lot of the Ron Paul people attending this thing was sort of a net-orchestrated flash event.

Poor Ryan Sorba. Deep down in his little heart he must want the man-sex so, so badly.

What the goddamn fucking fuck?

No, Ron Paul is very much a stereotypical Libertarian, bat-shit crazy and unaccepting of anything resembling rational thought. No way you can call him in favor of thought. Just because someone is willing to accept an unusual and far fetched conspiracy theory does not make them intelligent and open to knew ideas.

I still think that Colin Powell is pretty much the only intelligent, sane, not-full-of-bullshit and consistent Republican leader that I've seen in my lifetime.

I would like to agree but after the whole war business he has zero credibility left as far as I'm concerned.

I don't always agree with him and I think he's made plenty of mistakes, but at least he admits those mistakes and also makes sense when he speaks.

This is basically a battle for who will lead the conservative movement - the sick as fuck neocons or the constitutionalists.

Well, to be perfectly fair, he can also read the document he claims to cherish. I don't hear Paul, for instance, talk about how disgraceful it is to Mirandize non-citizens, when it plainly says in the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments that these are protections we extend to "Persons" and "the accused", and when last I heard citizenship was not equivalent with either. I fully agree that his economic theories belong in the dustbin of history, but you take your victories where you can get them.

I didn't respond to Pip because meaningless gibberish and name-calling doesn't merit rebuttal. As for this Miranda thing, I don't get the reference.

I am not a Ron Paul supporter, but he seems like a paragon of thoughtfulness and integrity compared to most politicians, particularly Republicans.

Taken literally, the simplistic atomized view of individual vs society that Libertarians hold is flawed. Pursued to it's logical conclusion, a wholly Libertarian gov't would be a disaster. However, these are theoretical concerns. Since most Americans believe in a fantastical sky God, which is far more absurd, I don't see the Libertarian world view as that far out, relatively, and since they are never going to succeed in completely changing the US into a Libertarian free-for-all, I don't see that as a big concern either.

Meanwhile, they oppose what I think are some of the biggest problems the US has right now: foreign military adventurism, the development of a police state at home, the rise of theocracy, an excess of bureaucracy, waste and stupid laws in many levels of gov't... all as a matter of principle. Practically speaking, they're pretty much OK with me.

Oh I hope Ron Paul runs again in 2012, not because I agree with 90% of his amazingly flawed take on the Constitution and the role of government, but because that crazy ol' gnome and his horde of internet sycophants are comedy gold.

Google Ron Paul blimp if you disagree, dollface.

Oh, and anyone putting any stock in the CPAC straw poll must have forgotten how Mitt Romney won 2 years in a row and didn't get nominated for shit.

Google Ron Paul blimp if you disagree, dollface.

*sigh*

Seriously. We're talking about a mass grouping of people at a convention that didn't laugh their asses off when Glenn Beck said (roughly) "when we expand government, we lose a part of ourselves. We take away the right to struggle." Amazing. I don't remember that being enumerated as a right. I would love to hear about how hard ol' Glenn ever had to "struggle."

I'm glad that kind of spin is coming largely only from him. However, it's not as if we aren't waging constant battle with that kind of philosophy when we're talking about libertarians and (though they do it selectively) neocons.

...and the nutball theocons, and the populist dimwits, and the faux-patriotic xenophobes, and the hypocritical moralists, and what seems to be the vast majority of the folks at CPAC who pretend to be all of the above whenever it suits them to do so.

Dr. Paul is not immune to this, by the way. His boy definitely ain't.

This is in comparison to the progressive movement, who, as a whole, is remarkably unified and focused?

I mean, fair's fair.