He’s a Republican, he’s antiwar – and the Establishment is deathly afraid of him
by Justin Raimondo
Portraits of Congressman Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, invariably descend into cliché – he is “Dr. No,” he’s against subsidies even for his own district, he’s a libertarian Don Quixote – but, then again, clichés are what the conventional wisdom is made of, and so we are told Rep. Paul’s run for the White House is a fool’s errand. He’s a “fringe” candidate, he has “no chance,” he’s just doing this to annoy the folks over at “The Corner” – this is what the mostly Washington-based cognoscenti of political punditry are telling us. Yes, even the ostensible “libertarians” over at the Cato Institute, one of whom sneered:
“The Republican debate in California last night showed that the field of candidates still lacks a Reagan-style small-government conservative among the top tier of candidates. The candidates invoked Reagan’s name at least 19 times, but one had to go all the way down to Rep. Ron Paul’s quixotic campaign before someone reflected Reagan’s commitment to limited government.”Never mind that the Reagan administration’s commitment to limited government was purely rhetorical, and that it never did anything to actually roll back the state: after all, the Catoites live and work in Washington, D.C., where partisan myths are sonorously uttered and routinely believed. However, this business about “all the way down” clearly denotes the attitude that Rep. Paul is beneath notice, and certainly doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously by the notoriously haughty Deep Thinkers over at Cato. (Say, aren’t these the same folks who are now telling us that twenty-five years of libertarian activism and scholarship have led to the growth of government, and “this isn’t as bad as it seems”?)
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10947