the Ron Paul phenomenon

Atrios notes some good paradoxes re: the media's treatment of the Ron Paul "issue":

I find the Ron Paul candidacy interesting, but that has nothing to do with support. It's interesting because I don't quite understand it. It's interesting because he highlights the unacknowledged-by-the-Villagers fact that anti-war sentiment has long since spread from dirty fucking hippies like me into other parts of the population. It's interesting because despite having significant fundraising and some early poll (New Hampshire) showing, his candidacy is largely ignored by the Village. It's interesting because Ron Paul is crazy but Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani are very serious (that is, there are certain types of crazy that the Village loves and certain kinds of crazy they marginalize).

I'll add one: it's interesting because, while the Village (and many blogs, for that matter) have been fixated on whether the hoary old kingmakers of the Christian Right will sit this election out, there's been a burgeoning, well-financed and planned, threatening-to-get-independent libertarian rebellion in that party. I think people just aren't getting the fact that the powerful Republicans contributors of the future-- the young, white, male, upwardly mobile, college-educated technocrats who have taken bought into Reaganite bootstrap theory "hook, line, and sinker"-- are not only being attracted to the Ron Paul movement in huge numbers, but are becoming something like converts to it. They're donating huge amounts of money to the campaign (you heard me, right? They're DONATING money!), they're volunteering time, and then they're harassing anti-Paul bloggers on the left and right in their spare time.

And their own party is bound and determined to beat them down, all in hopes of keeping in tow a fractious and utterly discredited Christian conservative movement whose anti-Roe triumphalism is virtually guaranteed to cost Republicans any hope of winning the presidency. Yes, women will turn out in a BIG way if they know that Roe v. Wade is on the line, which it unquestionably is, and the GOP knows it or they wouldn't suddenly be so minimalist about the end of Roe (I'm hearing a lot of "no, it simply returns it to the states!" b.s. from d-bags like Andrew Sullivan). Which is doubly ironic, because Ron Paul is rabidly anti-Roe (don't ask me how that jives with his "libertarian" cred).