Last week The Daily Show ran a piece about how the news media is unfairly ignoring Ron Paul. It was funny, truthful, and I even went to their facebook page to talk about it. Unfortunately, hundreds of people had already beaten me to it. There were perhaps half-a-thousand comments all expressing gratitude for the Paul piece and–even more curious–is that they all said almost exactly the same thing. Dozens of slight variations on the comments “Thank you, thank you, thank you for talking about the injustice towards Dr. Paul! The Daily Show has made a fan in me!” Well, if all it takes is one pro-Paul piece to make fans, I guess I’m about to make some lifelong non-fans of Alabama Liberal…
Ron Paul has a devotedly zealous online fan base and fundraising network. It’s the kind of people that will show up anytime, anywhere to champion their favorite politician with a religious devotion that is unusual for politicians. By contrast, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney might have more actual fans than Ron Paul, but you can bet money they can’t get a thousand people to vehemently defend them on any and all message boards from “Who Should Be the Next President?” to “Which Pie Recipe is the Best?” Paul’s fans don’t care if the topic is about Paul or even about politics, they will make it about Paul.
Even more curious is that he’s perhaps the one Republican candidate for president you can’t count on support slamming on liberal pages. Ordinarily, topics like “Rick Perry sucks” or “Bachmann is an idiot” will be greeted with unquestioned praise, but Paul is a much slipperier fish. The fact that he is the ONLY candidate to run for president in the last half century to be right about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and even Cuba has won him liberal accolades. The praise is so strong for Paul on this one issue that it’s enough to make people overlook that he is bad-to-downright terrible on abortion, Civil Rights, education, entitlements, any type of government regulation, fiscal policy, and even slavery. [Paul thinks the Civil War should have been avoided over the issue. I guess letting the South secede unimpeded would be his policy, thus putting him with Rick Perry in running to lead the federal government without really believing in it.]
So is being a military dove really enough to overshadow the fact that if Paul were successful in his ideals we would have one hell of a class war? This is the same guy that would end all entitlements, deregulate the markets completely, get rid of building code regulations/the EPA/the Department of Education, overturn the Civil Rights Act, and even dismantle the Federal Reserve in his quest to return America to the Gold Standard (Paul’s pet issue and the reason he got into politics).
It’s curious that Paul is so popular with liberals when he is basically the spiritual Godfather of The Tea Party, a group many liberals see as the problem with politics today. Paul is so adamant about abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to the Gold Standard that he said only two years ago “The U.S. will return to the Gold Standard, even it takes the near-ruin of the dollar to do it.” Well it certainly seems that his son Rand Paul and the other freshman Tea Partiers are taking care of that. Do people really want a president that wants to see the economy get worse (the only way the return to the gold standard will really be considered)?
And yet having said all this, I can just about guarantee the cult of Paul showing up here to argue with everything I’ve said. They’ll tell you that Paul isn’t a racist (I never said he was, but the man is unquestionably horrible on Civil Rights). That what he wants would actually be great for the economy (it wouldn’t, it honestly would ruin it). I have no doubt that they will slam me for my “ignorance” in not recognizing what a great man Paul is, same as I’m sure any cult’s followers have their leader before.
His fans will doubtlessly find a constitutional basis for defending everything Paul believes in but it’s all just bullshit. Libertarian ideals are great for sitting around a Radio Shack talking about how much the federal government sucks, but they’re lousy for actually protecting the people of this country from one another. The U.S. had to go to war to free the slaves, they had to impose a federal law to integrate the South, they had to impose a progressive tax system to build America into a first world country, and they’ll have to impose another federal law in about 15 years to make sure homosexuals can get married in Alabama.
The cult of Paul may bellyache at the “tyranny” of the federal government, but I think they might find that the real tyranny existed in 1776, a time before they were born. Tyranny doesn’t just exist when the feds ask billionaires to pay taxes to ensure your kids can go to a school that has a roof, it exists when there are no such laws, and some born into a good position run wild over those not born into a good position. If Paul loves America as much as he says, he should know better, and stop trying to turn back the clock on two centuries of progress.
thumbs up!
lmao