should have made the bet

w00t! I knew he wouldn't let us down!

The genius' argument: there is nothing as patriotic as rebellion. Similarly, we did not commit treason when we declared independence from Britain.

Ron Paul wants us to issue letters of marque

This is the genius that set all those conservative technocratic hearts all aflutter. Idiot.

Ron Paul to run as an independent?

I do not believe God loves us this much.

antiestablishmentarianism

Greenwald contributes a great article on the press' inability to take 3 presidential candidates seriously and the possible link between them. Those 3 candidates, by the way? Ron Paul (duh!), Mike Huckabee, and John Edwards. All pretty hardcore anti-establishment types and, interestingly, Huckabee and Edwards are the only 2 candidates who've made income inequality a centerpiece of their campaign. One of Greenwald's best moments:

...whenever these candidates are discussed, it almost never entails any discussion of the critiques they are making. Is Edwards right that corporations and lobbyists dictate legislation in Washington and that this state of affairs is profoundly anti-democratic and corrupt? Are Paul's criticisms of our bipartisan imperial policies and his warnings of resulting financial unsustainability (and increasing anti-Americanism) accurate? Is Huckabee's claim true that the GOP has obliterated the economic prospects of its own middle- and lower-middle-class followers?

Have you ever heard these topics discussed in our "national conversation?" I pay pretty close attention to politics, and I'd actually forgotten about Huckabee's concern for the poor. For all I criticize him, I do have to admit that he actually does appear to be the most genuinely compassionate Republican we've seen in a long time (except when it comes to immigrants, anyway), and he's definitely the first Republican in ages who isn't so much of a "drown government in the bathtub", anti-tax crusader.

These 2 things are, of course, linked, and highlight the strongest division in the Republican party: the one between the corporatists and the corpus Christi, the prophets and the profiteers.

Apropos to this conversation, you may know that Huckabee's been getting hit by Romney for l'Affair Dumond, but did you know that Huckabee today counterattacked by knocking Romney's refusal to grant clemencies?:

And yes, one must admit that for all the bad coverage Hillary and Obama get (and they do both get pretty shitty coverage) they're treated like royalty compared to Edwards.

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).

is Ron Paul going to make a 3rd party bid?

From Political Insider:

During an MSNBC interview Wednesday, Rep. Ron Paul was asked if he would run for president as a third-party candidate. Paul replied, "No, I don't plan to run in a third party. That's not my goal. But if we have a candidate that loves the war and loves the neocon position of promoting--" Interviewer Norah O'Donnell cut Paul off at that point, and did not return to the topic during the rest of the interview.

Does anyone else find it so delicious that the reporter cut Paul off right as he was about to bash the kind of people running Giuliani's campaign and Bush's foreign policy? Right as he was getting to the juicy stuff? It was like the whole national discourse in microcosm!

I put the odds at about 1000:1, but it would really be something if Giuliani won, and then both the Christian Right and Ron Paul made a 3rd party run. The one thing that keeps me from saying this definitely couldn't happen is that there is already, in existence and on the ballot in most states, a party tailor-made for each of them.

Then again, I think the last thing anyone wants is for that kind of realignment to stick: that would mean a viable Constitution Party.

only 2 Republicans have signed onto Youtube debate

From the Washington Post blog (c/o Jeff Jarvis):

Four days after the Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C,. more than 400 questions directed to the GOP presidential field have been uploaded on YouTube -- targeted at Republicans scheduled to get their turn at videopopulism on Sept. 17.

But so far, only Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) have agreed to participate in the debate, co-hosted by Republican Party of Florida in St. Petersburg.
...
Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both with dozens of videos on their YouTube channels, have not signed up. Neither have the rest of the Republican candidates, including Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), whose "Tancredo Takes" on his YouTube channel draw hundreds of views. Sources familiar with the Guiliani campaign said he's unlikely to participate...

In an interview Wednesday with the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, Romney said he's not a fan of the CNN/YouTube format. Referring to the video of a snowman asking the Democratic candidates about global warming, Romney quipped, "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

Very telling. You figure there might a whole mess of questions from Republican primary voters that certain GOP frontrunners don't want to answer? Or that the "Republican primary voter" is a breed that the GOP doesn't want the rest of the country to see?

Josh Marshall's gotten some reader comments, and has posted a couple of good points.

The first one:

You realize why Rudy doesn't like the YouTube debate format, right? He doesn't want the NY fire fighter's to get a clean shot at him on national TV.

Probably true. One can only imagine the reaction of the FDNY posting a scathing video demolishing Rudy's 9/11 cred, how he could possibly answer it, and what that would do to his numbers. Remember, 9/11 is his campaign. That's all he's got. And what are the moderators gonna do, not air the video from the friggin' FDNY? The scandal would probably cause such a ruckus that everyone would end up hearing about it and seeing the video on the Nightly News instead!
Here's the second one:

One of the thoughts that occurred to me with regards to the Democratic Youtube debate was how weird the questions for the GOP candidates could potentially be...As far as issues like illegal immigration and "coercive interrogation techniques" go, how does one ask questions like this in a Youtube format in an amusing way? The differences between the GOP base and the political mainstream can seem less extreme when asked by someone like Wolf Blitzer, but if presented from the standard GOP rank-and-file member of the base, it seemed like a great way to show how unhinged the GOP has become on some of these issues. Personally, I'm surprised the GOP ever got close to agreeing to this format, and once the Democratic debate happened and showed the format in action, I didn't see how it could have been pulled off by the GOP.

I agree that the Republican base, right now, is much farther from independents than the Democratic base, but I kinda think the moderators could weed out the less reasonable-sounding ones. I bet one could find the vids on Youtube (perhaps there's a specific category for the GOP debate? One would think so.) and look for oneself, but I don't really want to subject myself to that.

For what it's worth, I happen to think a debate between a floundering, desperate John McCain and a surging, confident Ron Paul could be fascinating to watch. Romney does contribute some great gag-lines, like "There is a global jihadist movement ... And they've come together as Shi'a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent" and "I'm pro-life," but other than that everyone else is just a waste of oxygen in these things anyway.

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.