The 2008 US presidential field is pretty much filled with duds, but none get me as riled up as fringe Republican candidate Ron Paul. It's not just his asinine policies, inconsistent voting record and archaic 19th century worldview; it's also the fact that his hordes of extremist followers have been collectively crapping their pants over him for the past several months now. It's admittedly refreshing to see an anti-war Republican on the stage, but that doesn't justify the cult of personality being built around him, especially when you factor in the fact that his policy initiatives run the gamut from returning to the gold standard and phasing out public education to demolishing the FBI and privatizing the military. Just Google Ron Paul and you'll find a wealth of bizarre, Stalinist devotion, often manifested in slavish praise on Youtube comment boards.
The worst offenders of Ron Paul mania are the masses of 19-year-old, bright-eyed idealists who think that his ideas are new, revolutionary, and would work great if only someone would put them into practice. The obvious punchline is that the US was operating under Paul's libertarian paradise for basically the first half of its history. A quick look at history disproves the claims I've heard made by Ronpaulogists: food and drug companies wouldn't self-regulate if we destroyed the FDA (in fact, they were dumping snake oil and arsenic into their goods with impunity before it existed), the gold standard isn't some magical inflation-proof cure-all (in fact, gold standard currency undergoes sporadic, wild spasms of inflation and deflation), and a lack of public schools left much of the population too illiterate to perform most of today's jobs.
Actually, when I said that the 19-year-old idealists were the worst offenders, I left out the white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, who have flocked to the nutty Dr. Paul like a messiah. David Duke, a former governor of Louisiana and the nation's most prominent KKK member and neo-Nazi, is a fervent supporter of Ron Paul and his 19th century ideals, and rants on his official website about the vast Zionist media conspiracy against the man he literally calls his "king." If it was just this guy supporting Paul, I wouldn't make a big deal about it, but I've had a hard time finding a single white supremacist, 9/11 truther or any other that doesn't rally behind the only presidential candidate to claim that the 1964 Civil Rights Act "increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty."
So the next time someone in a sandwich board waving a bunch of pamphlets around tries to talk to you about Dr. Ron Paul, just remember that the guy is supporting a certifiable nutcase.
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