Ross Douthat makes a reasonable amount of good sense on the Ron Paul sitch here. I will try to add my little bit of good sense at this time — 24 hours before the Iowa raucous starts — bringing the national percentage of good sense about Paul up to about 1.7%.
Nate and I were talking about the Ron Paul phenomenon a couple days ago, and he made a point that I think can’t be emphasized enough. We have gotten to the point where a significant portion of middle America is beyond exasperated with Washington and all its mendacious, untruthful, beguiling, deluding, dissembling, lying, fabricated, faked, fudged, paltering, prevaricating, bee-essing, and tricksy ways. That exasperated portion of the electorate can’t figure out any other way to give the Establishment the bird than by voting for Ron Paul. Don’t chop off all our other fingers, and then tell us to be more respectful with our gestures. If it makes you feel any better, just call it 20% of a wave.
Exasperated, you say? Why would you be so exasperated that you would lend even the mildest of approbative comments to an extremist character like Paul? Well, I am an extremist character myself, so that makes things somewhat easier . . .
Decades ago, it used to be the case that nutters stayed out on the fringes hiding from the floride, and respectable men, the kind who have airports named after them, ran the show. But in recent years, there isn’t a lunatic notion that hasn’t been tried on a grand scale by the insiders-in-charge straight out of Harvard, and I include in this the Prince of Nutters, a president who wants to spend us into the black. The bigger the shovel, the smaller the hole!
This confounding of the categories has had the effect of flattening everything. How are we supposed to know who the nutters are anymore?
And thus it goes. Sometimes the mainstream goes right over Horseshoe Falls, and spang into Lake Ontario, leaving the chump of a taxpayer who went over those falls in a barrel mostly dead.
Shall I illustrate with the most recent outrage? The president now wants to raise the debt ceiling another 1.2. Trill. Actually, there is a point of personal privilege here that I should offer first. I think the National Weather Service should start naming each new trillion, like they do with hurricanes. “The president has requested the creation of Susannah . . .”
Now back to raising the debt ceiling . . . why do we have to do that since we’ve been suffering under these draconian budget cuts for lo, these last two years? Well, because everybody, Republican leadership included, is still playing the Game that reductions in the projected rates of increase count as cuts, in their wing of the asylum anyway. And for more on that, check out the various terms for mendacity in the second paragraph and start using them more.
You see, Congress has been losing weight like crazy, which is why they need to authorize the purchase of these new slacks that have six more inches in the girth, and bits of elastic sewn in the waistband. The only person willing to call them hurtful terms like “lardbucket” is way out of the mainstream, having discredited himself with some newsletters back in the day. Incidentally, what Ron Paul needs to do is admit to having published those newsletters, but deny having inhaled at all. In the meantime, the mainstreamers are showing every sign of having inhaled plenty of something.
This is how insiders nonpareil like Gingrich are saying crazy things trying to get themselves some of that crazy outsider cred. See what I mean? Everything’s flattened.
I said on another occasion that I would probably vote for Santorum, even though I had some problems with him. The reason is that he is credibly and thoroughly pro-life, and openly hostile to the sodomification of our public life. The principal problem I have with him is that his record in the Senate appears to have been that of a free-spending Republican, and the need of the hour is to have a president who is so tight that he squeaks when he walks. But I have confidence that a Congress full of hot-headed tea-partiers would be able to restrain any wayward spending impulses of a pro-life president. If the House of Representatives is full of budget-slashing Mohawks, I don’t mind if the president’s budget-cutting speechifying to this point was only lip-service. Better that than the other way.
So if Ron Paul wins in Iowa, or comes in a close second, I for one will not spend any time with my head between my knees, breathing into a brown paper bag. It will be simply a matter of the Republican Establishment having to deal with a creature entirely of their own making, and I will be interested to watch what they do about it. And if, perchance, any of them ask me what I think they, the responsible faction of the party, ought to do, my answer will be “stop lying to us so much.” Try that.