Scandal!

Colin McNickle searches high and low for a genuine conservative to undo the damage done 1994-2006 when the Republicans outright succombed to temptation and betrayed long-held principles.

Unlike most informed Americans, he does *not find what he's looking for in Congressman Ron Paul. Why? McNickle has discovered a scandalous flaw:

... you simply can't put out of your mind his resemblance to Timothy Leary. On paper on many issues Paul doesn't look bad. Watch him in a debate and two words come to mind: blotter acid

Is there a dailywtf for politics?

The other candidates on the GOP side get pretty competent refutations of how their conservative words don't match their records, or in a couple cases how they don't even bother with conservative words. Dr. Paul gets the oddest guilt-by-association attack I've seen (and if you're an RP watcher, you've seen some odd ones).

In fairness, McNickle takes a moment to add that Paul is also "a flop on defense". No explanation of that charge seems necessary to him.

Here's the official platform of the GOP of my state (Texas) on National Defense:

We continue to encourage and support:
1. funding for a strong national defense, which guarantees maintaining a military which stands ready to defend our nation and increases combat readiness;
2. continued funding and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative
3. disengagement from countries in which we have no clear national defense interest;
4. “America First” priority in protecting the citizens and borders of the United States;
5. not entering into any new arms control agreements with any nation that is not currently complying with previous agreements;
6. the military never being deployed except to defend against an invasion or in protection of the United States’ direct, vital interests; and which may include pre-emptive action
7. maintaining our military’s effective combat strength sufficient to defend our nation’s borders and its strategic interests;
8. expiration of the special emergency war powers of the executive branch unless renewed by Congress in 6 month intervals; and,
9. the immediate deployment of the United States of America’s Military Forces to secure America’s southern border.

If you don't have time to read all that, I think it can be summarized as "Ron Paul is pretty much right about everything." We could quibble about things like the definition of "pre-emptive" (google is your friend), but the fact remains that RP is far from a "flop".

He doesn't look all that much like Leary, either.

Ron Paul -- The Perfect Imperfect Candidate

I've been getting quite annoyed recently with the general tenor of RP discussion by a lot of blogs & zines who ought to be jumping for joy at the fact that Dr. Paul is running for president. It goes like this, usually

"Ron Paul's great -- just what this country needs -- but ..."

And then we get a discussion of some flaw in RP's views, or some election pitfall that could trip him up. We often get an authoritative-sounding discussion of why, alas, he cannot win the nomination or the office. What we do not get, sadly, is cojones. By that I mean an endorsement: "Americans should support Ron Paul". Why not?

Because the writer has discovered action X by Ron Paul isn't fully synchronized with the true libertarian understanding of line 213 of the Constitution, or something. Egad!

Might be true. And we could conceivably argue about it for several days. Meanwhile:

Ed Crane asked Giuliani whether he "believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review... The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently."

To summarize, Giuli said "yes, the president has that authority, but trust me I'm a nice guy and won't do it much." In other words, Crane said "should we have habeas corpus?" and Giuli said 'No.' While you argue about the interpretation of line 213, the frontrunners have all more or less burned their copies of the Constitution to the ground.

If Ron Paul "can't win" against these guys, that should make you angry. On a scale of 1 to 10 Ron Paul is about an 8 and no other candidate is above 5. Why keep covering the fact that he isn't a 10? (End rant)