Having lived in Austin for thirty-one years this month and having graduated high school in Houston before that, Ron Paul is old hat to me. His bat-shit crazy "extreme ideas" have been around a long, long time and just because they have a nutty heritage from his days as a full blown self proclaimed Libertarian, it doesn't mean they are not without a certain attraction. His pointing out that the Fed and the cabal of bankers were not benign, and in fact, were the enemy, brought a very early a-ha moment to me way back there. He might have been the reason I had to check on what those guys believed in just to make sure that I wasn't one of them;I wasn't. But after Carter got smoked and having survived Reagan, I was left with Clinton selling us on NAFTA and taking apart the regulations on Wall Street, etc, I was trying to find some footing. Looking long and hard. Because if you keep turning left hard enough you wind up sitting looking over the fence at the the extreme right. My Marxian economics all twisted up with the Trilateral Commission and Ron Paul was right there getting elected to office spouting this crazy.
And in the Eighties and early Nineties in Austin. Public access television was amazing.
Follow me over the puff of orange Satan smoke for more.
Austin Public Access television (ACTV) was a fledgling outfit where one could go and learn to make your own show largely free of charge and it would be on the tv usually very late at night/early in the morning; uncut and often live. All sorts of real crap was on but there were also gems; Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley recorded up close and personal, Bill Hicks recorded in early performances at comedy clubs, and this little known dude who was and is a huge fan of Ron Paul's; a good old Austinite named Alex Jones.
Jones had a quiet following and he read from the newspapers- real newspapers- WSJ, the Guardian, the NY Times and other "legitimate" news sources. This was the olden days before the interwebs. Jones would come up with this outrageous stuff about US sponsored right wing hit squads in Central America and guns for dope and Iran; later there was Waco and it sounded absolutely crazy. Problem was, he would give sources and if you had the gumption you could go pull the source and there it was and it was factual as factual gets. After a certain point of multi-sourced tales of crazy- one has to accept some truth. Slice, dice and digest but there is truth in there somewhere. And the facts of it were there. Jones had credibility sitting there in his Fruit-of-the-Loom pocket t-shirt and his stack of news sources. And Jones loved (loves) Ron Paul. I was reminded of this love as I heard Jones on his radio show interviewing one of Paul's brothers on the day of the recent Iowa Caucus and taking lots of credit for having put the candidate where he is today.
My point here is that while Alex has gone way off into the weeds with his conspiracy behind every bush theories which has led to him being looked upon as an uber-crazy;(almost like a plan to discredit any validity he might have actually had- hear the black helicopters yet?) his idol Ron Paul has become a darling of the Teabagging branch of the GOP. And since the entire GOP is really just various shades of Teabaggers at this point, Paul has a lot of relative traction in the Republican party. Which is really weird to type, let alone wrap one's mind around.
Still, while no one in who is not a disciple of the Doctor believes he has a snowball's chance of actually winning the GOP nod- he is out there as, and will serve as, the Right's version of Nader. He is going to gum up the works and be blamed when the chaos that is the GOP Clown Car self destructs in the wake of the election.
But Paul's message, while being played in a muted voice over the GOP radio, hasn't really changed. His non electability is a perfect example of the old adage, "If voting could change the system, it wouldn't be legal". Like a candidate whose preoccupation is dismantling the Fed and the banking system, for whatever reason, has a remote shot at being given the reins of power. As if. See the Kool-aid mustaches on their upper lips? I think it's grape? Keep on believing and clicking your heels and on to New Hampshire!
Just don't tell the GOP or the MSM that it's a charade, a bit of political anyone-but-Mittens kabuki theater- let's keep it our little secret. This is going to be good.