Late yesterday afternoon, I stumbled into a well written article on the Daily Caller site by a Ron Paul devotee named Jack Hunter. As anyone familiar with my intertubes genius would expect, I dropped a comment stating my position on some aspect of the article, with my standard signature linking back to my blogspot archive.
I briefly considered commenting on my agreement with the author that Herman Cain was wrong in his support of TARP. If we never bailed out the damn banks in the first place, we’d already be well into the recovery today – and without Leftist mobs in the streets demanding the bailout riches – which have all been paid back - be redistributed to them today (presumably for even more expensive tents).
I let it go though – because I know Herman Cain to be educable and pragmatic (meaning ‘practical’, not ‘unprincipled’) as an executive. I’ve seen him do it. Perhaps in a future post, I’ll explore why I find the sins of my other “not-Romney” favorite – Newt Gingrich – more egregious; i.e. falling for the Global Warming hoax and being slow off the mark embracing the TEA Party movement.
I chose instead to comment on the importance to get on with the primary process of finding the ‘not-Romney’ on principled grounds. As well as looking ahead to the possibility Romney can still win, and we may need to suck it up and be big boys come general election time. Which will mean embracing Romney as ‘not-Obama’ (with noses firmly held, of course).
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Comment board chaos ensued. Frankly, I should have anticipated it, given who I was dealing with. But I failed to, and now I have to write this damned post. ;)
A swarm of Ron Paul devotees jumped on the thread to frantically push their man’s case. Some of the content, and the whole attitude of it, is entirely unhinged. You can read it for yourself.
The swarm failed to abate even after I told them to read my March 1, 2010 blogspot post for a comprehensive read designed to put the discussion to rest, and allow us to at least agree to disagree.
Actually, I should have anticipated this would be a fruitless offer. I suspect most of this swarm have never taken a breath from ranting long enough to read and comprehend that many words all at once.
The swarm still continues this morning. Trust me when I tell you I could make a game of causing it to continue as long as I cared to, inclusive of “endlessly.” Or in the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson, I can now simply report on my experience from the thick of the fight. At least having my character and motives mischaracterized, misunderstood, and smeared on a comment board is lighter duty than getting beat up by the Hell’s Angels (an actual HST episode).
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The core problem with the Ron Paul mob is a wicked mix of two character defaults; a naiveté about how the world works, and a religiosity around their devotion to their candidate. This, as a matter of fact, if you replace the word “candidate” with “ideology,” is the same axis of character defects that makes Jihadis an existential threat to the planet, and Leftists an existential threat to the constitution.
