Ron Paul rides off into the sunset

Ron Paul suspended his campaign the day before yesterday. WOOD-TV used that piece of news to begin And then there were two.






This makes for the fourth GOP candidate for whom I've bothered to make a label on this blog to leave the race. In honor of this occasion, I will bid him adieu, just as I did when Gingrich, Santorum, and Cain exited the contest. Join me over the fold for Ron Paul's greatest hits on Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Here's what I had to say about Ron Paul over the course past year. Things started relatively positive side in Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

[T]he paragons for telling the truth have been Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. My appraisal of Ron Paul in 2008 was that the man can see the country's problems clearly. It's just that his solutions are delusional. I've also said that Ron Paul is a stuck clock who is right twice a day. It looks like that's enough to make him the second most truthful politician in the room during GOP debates. As for Huntsman, he has avoided making any completely false statements. Too bad for both Paul and Huntsman that neither will be nominated.
...
The bad news is that Politifact grades Ron Paul as being more truthful than President Obama. If the Paulturds find this out, we'll never hear the end of it.

Fortunately, they never did.

Things went downhill for Paul from there. In Paul Krugman's and Robin Wells' gifts for GOP presidential candidates, I quoted a list of gifts from the couple to various GOP candidates, including "A Ron Paul Austrian-English dictionary." That led directly into The Austrian School: Faith-based economics and pseudoscience in which I mocked Ron Paul's economic ideas using Paul Krugman's arguments, a tactic I repeated in the conclusion of Auto sales as economic stimulus* I became more insulting with Last night was the beginning of the primary/caucus season for 2012, where I dissed all the candidates competing in Iowa, elaborating on my stuck clock metaphor for Ron Paul.

The Republican candidates are a bunch of clowns. Rick Perry is so dumb, a zombie was walking down the street in Des Moines the other day, saw Governor Goodhair, and turned away to look elsewhere for brains. Newt Gingrich doesn't even have the organization to get his name on the ballot in the state where he now lives, Virginia. Bachmann is exactly the kind of maniac that would promise cheap gas to keep suburbia alive. Ron Paul is stopped clock who is right twice a day, namely at 4:20. Rick Santorum is famous because his surname is a synonym for froth. Romney is a corporate robot who will do whatever his programmers tell him to do. Poor Huntsman had to sign on to climate denial in order to stay viable. Finally, when I tell people about Buddy Roemer, who has the closest thing to James's "My Tea Party" platform, the response is "who?"

The last thing worthy of repeating that I wrote about Paul compared what I liked about him to Newt Gingrich's enthusiasm for space.

Gingrich's grandiose plans for space exploration are the only thing I like about him. They prove that, unlike much, even most of the rest of his party, he hasn't given up on science. I applaud him for that. However, his ideas about space are not enough to get me to vote for him. It would be like voting for Ron Paul because of his anti-war and pro-legalization positions, while the rest of what he advocates is just unacceptable.

And then there are his crazy followers. The most popular of them was Tell me now, which deity do the Dominionists really worship?, which ended up being the seventh most popular post of the first year of this blog, with 310 page views and two comments as of March 31st.** That was the one in which I quoted AmericaBlog's description of a Think Progress video of a GOP debate, which read:

The largest audience cheers in the Republican presidential debate came when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul whether he wanted an uninsured 30 year old with a treatable disease to die because he didn't have health insurance. You can hear the crowd shout, "let him die."

Then there's Robert Morrow, a Paul supporter who was running a kooky smear campaign against Rick Perry. Of him, I wrote:

It turns out that Morrow is doing the same thing to Perry that he was doing to Clinton back in 2008.

St. Petersburg Times: Some people just love to hate the Clintons
Spreading dubious theories is a Texas man's full-time hobby. What will he do if the senator loses?

The answer to that question ended up being "find a new target." This time, it was the in-state rival to his beloved Ron Paul. Maybe he's trying to replicate for Ron Paul what worked for Michele Bachmann against Tim Pawlenty. Good luck with that.

It turned out that Perry departed the race well ahead of Paul, but Morrow's bizarre crusade had nothing to do with it.

Not all of his fan's antics deserve disapproval. In Elaine Meinel Supkis uses anime and draws fan art to make sustainability points, I included a photo of one of his followers holding up a "fail!" sign at a congressional hearing. Elaine herself was a fan, but she has since soured on Paul.***

Finally, there are people who had Ron Paul's number all along. One of the most eloquent is my friend John "LowGenius" Henry, who had a starring role in Ted Nugent, stochastic terrorist. Here he is with his video "Ron Paul is a Fraud."

The myth that Ron Paul is a friend to idealistic young people needs to be ended. He's not - especially if you believe in things like equality across ethnic groups, genders, and sexual orientations. Ron Paul is not your friend, and neither his is spawn, no matter how many times they push the "legal pot" button to distract people from their actual ideology and behavior.

Bibliography and some comments on the surprisingly quick and unfortunately NOT surprisingly weak wave of criticism against this video can be found at the blog page for the video

LowGenius has continued documenting Ron Paul's grandstanding and hypocrisy, posting Ron Paul Frauds Again! at the beginning of this month.

Okay, Paul Bearers...entertain me by making an excuse for this. Hint: If he's got time to shoot videos about it, he ought to have time to vote about it.

Note how the free speech loving Paul Bearers glom together to stifle my comments, while engaging in such witty banter as "ur a fag" and "get a haircut." Yeah. Individual liberty my ass, the only freedom these asshats care about is the freedom to push other people around...just like their hero.

You tell them, John Henry!

Above crossposted to Daily Kos.

*Time to watch the "Paul vs. Paul" and post an entry featuring that "debate."

**It now has 315 page views and four comments. That reminds me, it's time to do that article's retrospective, but not in this post.

***I've soured on her, too. After her father died, she became increasingly cranky, posting fringe ideas about astronomy and falling over the line between a principled anti-Zionism into outright anti-Semitism. I think she's rebelling against her families, both by birth and by marriage, as her father was an astronomer and both her husband and ex-husband are Jewish. I suspended commenting on her posts because of her anti-Semitism, only resuming briefly on the Paul entry because there was no anti-Semitism in it. I doubt I'll comment there against unless she ceases. I have my doubts.