Not Over for Paul

Ron Paul, a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force, father of five, with eighteen granchildren, having delivered more than 4,000 babies, continues to fight for the presidency--with plenty of support from voters:

Mr. Paul has $7.8 million in cash, more than Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney combined.

Mr. Paul also took in $20 million in the third quarter of 2007, again more than Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney combined. For all of 2007, Mr. Paul raised $28 million and spent $20 million, increasing his spending to $17 million in the last three months of 2007.

This year, Mr. Paul’s supporters have donated $4.7 million in a fund-raising drive set up to honor his 51st wedding anniversary.

One article notes:

You can hear congressmen when they walk down the hall, strutting their own importance. After all, there are regulations to be implemented, special interests to serve, a teetering American Empire that would collapse without their management. They wear black or cordovan leather shoes—captoes, wingtips, and brogues—clacking down the hall, their bellies full of medium-rare steak from Capital Grille. They are surrounded by ambitious interns and legislative aides. They fiddle with their BlackBerries. You can’t miss them tromping out of the elevators.

Ron Paul is easy to overlook. He takes the stairs; he does not have an entourage. You can’t hear him coming because he’s wearing plain black tennis shoes. In a bag he carries a can of soup that he will heat for himself in the microwave in his office. Beneath pictures of Austrian economists Frederick Von Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, he will eat his lunch alone and in peace.

From News Leader:

During the CNN Republican presidential debate (broadcast live on Wednesday, Jan. 30), Anderson Cooper repeatedly ignored Ron Paul, choosing to cater to John McCain and Mitt Romney.

The irony in all of this is at the end of the debate, McCain and Romney stated why Ronald Reagan would have endorsed them. The fact of the matter is that Ron Paul is the only candidate in the 2008 presidential race that actually was endorsed by Reagan. According to the Catholic Monitor Blog, Reagan said: "Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country."

The mainstream media insists on describing him as a long-shot candidate. Paul leads in fundraising and leads in donations from our servicemen and women in the military. He is for a sound money supply, putting an end to foreign intervention and putting America's security first by bringing our troops home to protect our borders. He is for dissolving the IRS and the income tax. In fact, in the 10 terms that he has served in Congress, he has never voted for a tax increase.

No doubt the media will continue to label the good congressman as a "long shot;" however, it is the same mainstream media that described Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson as the "front-runners" a few short months ago.

And from The Conservative Voice:

His message is simple: We must return to government under the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
...
Paul has been consistent in all areas of his life, exemplary character, holding to traditional values and boldly facing the future of this country. He doesn’t talk or use his faith in God politically, but it’s there underneath everything he says. He’s the most conservative, traditional gentleman in the ball game. Can’t be said for all other candidates of both parties.

While McCain and Romney, add Huckabee, try to outdo themselves in their claims to be the “most conservative,” the true conservative continues [to] walk the talk.

The classical conservatism of bygone eras has been replaced by the neoconservatism of the current Republican platform, and conservatives don't seem to have noticed...

Do the American people really believe it’s the government’s responsibility to make us morally better and economically equal? Do we have a responsibility to police the world, while imposing our vision of good government on everyone else in the world with some form of utopian nation building?
...
Neoconservatism is not the philosophy of free markets and a wise foreign policy. Instead, it represents big-government welfare at home and a program of using our military might to spread their version of American values throughout the world.
...
It's of interest to note that some large Christian denominations have joined the neoconservatives in promoting preemptive war, while completely ignoring the Christian doctrine of a Just War....The fact that neo-conservatives ridicule those who firmly believe that U.S. interests and world peace would best be served by a policy of neutrality and avoiding foreign entanglements should not go unchallenged. Not to do so is to condone their grandiose plans for an American world hegemony.... It is getting more difficult to get fair and balanced discussion on the issues, because it has become routine for the hegemons to label those who object to preemptive war and domestic surveillance as traitors, unpatriotic and un-American.

--Rep. Ron Paul, 2003

I usually don't do politics on this blog, for the simple reason that politics (and politicians) make me nauseous--which is precisely why I am voting for Ron Paul. Republicans can continue to write him off as quirky or overly-purist, but no one can say he is not the consistently principled candidate among the lot, nor that he's not a firm believer in the Constitution. If neoconservatives actually took the time to study our founding document, they might be surprised to learn that the ideas of the current "conservative" movement are foreign to those embodied in the Constitution.