THE GOP IS SCARED OF RON PAUL? RON PAUL IS THE GOP!

What the Time Magazine headline means to convey is that the slimy careerist Insiders who run the top down organization known as the Republican Party, Inc are scared of Ron Paul. Paul represents the fact of true believers that embraces long-abandoned GOP principles of "limited spending, limited interference in individual lives and limited intervention in foreign affairs." Today the GOP is basically just a regional Confederate Party representing Corporate Interests (Greed and Selfishness) with a marriage of convenience to Know Nothing bigots, racist, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists and all kinds of religionist lunatics.

The Beltway Insiders are furious that Paul hasn't dropped his bid for the presidency and hasn't endorsed McBush. In fact, he's publicly stated he won't support McBush until he changes his approach to Iraq, the heart of the entire McBush campaign. "Instead he argues that all Republicans should have 'the right to vote for someone that stands for traditional Republican principles.' And he's got a point."

The real significance of the Paul campaign is not the ubiquitous bumper stickers and lawn signs or the online fundraising records ($6 million in one day, plus another $4 million, hilariously, on Guy Fawkes Day) but the mirror Paul held up to the modern Republican Party. When his fellow candidates denounced big government, Paul was there to remind them that President Bush and the G.O.P. Congress had shattered spending records and exploded the deficit. When they hailed freedom, Paul asked why they all supported the Patriot Act and other expansions of executive power. And when they called themselves conservatives, Paul asked what was so conservative about sending thousands of young Americans to try to transform the Middle East.

...Under Bush's leadership, of course, the Republican Party has been anything but frugal and anything but isolationist. The congressional Republican revolutionaries seemed to lose their zeal for shrinking the federal government once they controlled it, which is one reason voters expelled them from power in 2006. And these days, it's usually Democrats who call for a humbler foreign policy. Paul's leave-us-alone libertarianism hasn't fit in with a party anxious to read our e-mail, improve our values, assert American power abroad and subsidize friendly industries at home. The party's recent mix of "national greatness" neoconservatives, evangelical theoconservatives and K Street careerists has had many goals, but leaving people alone hasn't been one of them. That's why Paul was the one getting booed at G.O.P. debates. And that's one reason why Paul's fervent followers were banned from the activist Republican website RedState.

...[E]ven if you set aside Paul's kookier ideas, there just doesn't seem to be a road to the White House for any candidate who opposes the war in Iraq as well as higher taxes, the war on drugs as well as higher spending, restrictions on privacy as well as restrictions on guns. That's a real "freedom agenda," a true assault on big government, and while it clearly spoke to some angry dudes with high-speed web connections and time on their hands, it's just as clearly not where America stands today. Paul didn't have a lot of company on the House floor when he rose recently to complain about government overreach in the investigation of the disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after revelations that he had been a customer of a high-end prostitution ring.

Actually many of Paul's ideas are ideas embraced by grassroots Americans on both sides of the partisan divide. Many of his ideas resonate better with real people than anything McCain is spouting and make more sense than what the Hillary campaign has devolved into. Insiders have more in common with each other than they do with real people. Compared to the rest of the GOP candidates, Paul was the only one campaigning for change-- which explains why so many of his supporters say they'd rather vote for Obama than vote for McCain. Which reminds me: Open Left and Blue Majority endorsed Obama today as well.