Liberty Reborn

I warned you about this a few days ago. Ron Paul and his supporters are planning to disrupt the GOP conventions at the State and national level and take advantage of voter apathy who think that now that their votes have been cast, the nomination process is over. It’s not and the paulbots know it.

They will settle for a bigger seat at the table when it comes to the platform, but their real goal is to see if they can get enough delegates in place to prevent the nomination from going to John McCain.

Virtually all the nation’s political attention in recent weeks has focused on the compelling state-by-state presidential nomination struggle between two Democrats and the potential for party-splitting strife over there.

But in the meantime, quietly, largely under the radar of most people, the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in St. Paul at the beginning of September.

Paul’s presidential candidacy has been correctly dismissed all along in terms of winning the nomination. He was even excluded as irrelevant by Fox News from a nationally-televised GOP debate in New Hampshire.

But what’s been largely overlooked is Paul’s candidacy as a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party’s most conservative conservatives. As anticipated a month ago in The Ticket, that situation could be exacerbated by today’s expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

…

The last three months Paul’s forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upwards of one million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; McCain is a terrible candidate who has a track record of trashing the Constitution when it suits him as well as pandering to groups when he seeks power. But Ron Paul? Give me a break! He is a faux conservative/libertarian who on one had requests unconstitutional spending while on the other votes against it. No true conservative/libertarian would even let unconstitutional spending come to a vote.

Couple this with his non-libertarian views on liberty being an unalienable right and that as long as he’s got his screw everyone else and you have a man and a group of followers who are just as bad as John McCain and not exactly people you want having much of a say in the platform building process.

Make no mistake, the supporters of Ron Paul really believe that their candidate is the Barack Obama of the GOP and swoon when he speaks – ignoring his failings of course. And if they can they want to overturn the nomination and put his name on the ticket. They won’t but they will try.

And if the apathetic voters let them they might just do even more damage to the Republican Party. Which, on second thought might not be a bad idea. But I certainly don’t want them in charge of platform writing and policy making any more than McCain’s supporters.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 7:19 am and is filed under J.J. Jackson's Daily Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.