LAWFUEL – The Ron Paul factor intervenes upon just about anyone searching the Net for news on the US presidential campaign.
Canada’s Globe and Mail reports that the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’, as the campaign styles itself, is simply everywhere. They report: ‘In real-world polling, the Texas congressman is scoring only about 5 per cent of decided voters for the Republican nomination, leaving him in a distant fifth place. But post-debate polls conducted online and via text messages by the big U.S. networks have resulted in massive Paul victories. Blogs and message boards have been flooded with responses by his followers, to the extent that one popular conservative site banned his supporters outright.
‘Another took Paul off the ballot of an online poll in frustration, and was so inundated with complaints that it snidely re-ran the poll, this time with each one of the 10 options reading “Ron Paul.”
‘Open online polls, of course, have more or less zero real-world validity, saying less about the popularity of the given options than about the ability of special-interest groups to mobilize Internet-dwellers. On this count, the Ron Paul campaign has succeeded in spades.
Paul himself certainly cuts an interesting figure: He’s an iconoclast who appeals to the deep libertarian vein that runs through American politics. Paul advocates a strict and literal reading of the U.S. Constitution, eschewing anything that doesn’t fit with his view of it, including things like state-run health care, gun control and, critically, overseas military adventures.’
With a soft-spoken, doctrinaire attachment to “freedom” – that’s freedom the concept, not freedom the war-mongering euphemism – the man comes across as a thoughtful fundamentalist.
