"First they ignore you..."
Check.
"...then they ridicule you..."
Check.
"...then they fight you..."
Check*.
"...then you win."
All I'm saying is that for an "unserious", "kooky" candidate of the lunatic fringe (who remember: has absolutely no chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination!), Ron Paul is attracting an awful lot of invective from the GOP establishment.
But don't take my word for it. Consult the almighty Google:
"Mike Huckabee is crazy": 1 hit
"Tom Tancredo is crazy": 7 hits
"Duncan Hunter is crazy": 0 hits
"Ron Paul is crazy": 740 hits
Naturally, another explanation of these data is that Ron Paul really is crazy. And that's fine, but do keep in mind that Huckabee (probably) thinks the world is 6000 years old** and Tancredo thinks that Mexicans want to bomb our shopping malls. Google stats don't track reality--they track what people are saying. (To be fair, "John McCain is crazy" turns up a staggering 4190 hits...but he is a much higher-profile candidate. Who might, in fact, be crazy.)
*Radley Balko gives Mona Charon's insipid column a much more thorough refutation than it really deserves.
**To be fair, when asked directly Huckabee has stated that he "doesn't know" whether the Biblical account is literally true or not. Maybe it's just my own brand of fundamentalism talking, but saying that the Bible might be literally true is only a scant hair away from saying that it is, in terms of absurdity. Try substituting "Alice in Wonderland" or "Beowulf" for "the Bible" in that train of thought.
2 comments:
good points
in reality, they DO fear paul. i've never seen an actual attempt to debate his positions, just dismissal. that says a lot.
the real lunatics are those who keep responding to the same problems with the same solutions that created the problems in the first place.
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