Ron Paul is not who you think he is

If I were Rudy Giuliani or John McCain (known in the jungle as the Pandersaurus) or Mitt Romney (whose followers are affectionately known as "mittheads"), right after the primary ends I'd take as hard of a left turn as I could on one or two issues. If they do so, they'll probably win in a landslide because progressives and liberals apparently have an acute, though latent, case of the Stupid that triggers upon hearing a conservative take a liberal stance on one issue that they care about. We saw this with way too many liberals in Texas with Kinky Friedman, and he didn't even need a liberal stance on any issues; he just needed a bunch of snappy one liners.

Now we're seeing it with far-right nutjob Ron Paul. David Neiwert dismantles him ably at Orcinus; I'd suggest checking it out, just to get a sense of how cuckoo Paul really is. For background, phenry @ dKos wrote a good series on him. Paul is what you might call "the far, far right's ambassador to reality." And I don't mean "far right" like Jerry Falwell or Grover Norquist. I mean far right like "heavily armed white guys staring out the windows waiting for the Mexican horde or the black helicopters" far right. Or the "the Jews caused 9/11 and are secretly seeking world domination by hijacking the UN" far right. Here's a taste:

Paul, a tireless foe of the United Nations for more than 30 years, is one of the higher-profile proponents of the familiar "New World Order" conspiracy theory, a paranoid fantasy in which a shadowy group of powerful players is perpetually plotting to conquer the world. Like many on the fringe, Paul takes his fear of other countries to ridiculous extremes; when asked by radio host Alex Jones in November 2005 about a report that Dutch and Mexican troops were helping out with Hurricane Katrina relief operations, Paul called it "a horrible precedent, and it's all part of the NAFTA scheme and globalization and world government."

Again, he's the ambassador, so a lot of what he says, looked at individually, can be rationalized away or may even sound reasonable, until you see who he's really speaking to and what he really means. Liberals, for instance, are also against aspects of globalization and NAFTA, but not for the same reasons Paul is against them, and the end result of President Paul abolishing NAFTA wouldn't be anything resembling what liberals would want or expect.

Check out the phenry posts and the Orcinus posts to see what I mean.

Here, by the way, are some choice nuggets ripped straight off his campaign website:

NAFTA”s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system.

And there's this, one of his points to solving the immigration issue:

End birthright citizenship. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.

The incredible hypocrisy and the apostasy against a core American belief should be self-evident.