THE WEIRD MR. PAUL – Ron Paul has won the straw poll among potential 2012 presidential contenders at the big CPAC meeting in Washington.  Aren't you excited?

Charles Krauthammer said, correctly, that the CPAC meeting is bit strange.  It really doesn't represent either conservatism or the Republican Party.  It's well known that the Ron Paul alternative-universe crowd trucks in loads of true believers to vote in the straw poll.  The poll doesn't mean a thing, but the fact that a lunatic like Paul wins it every year should be an embarrassment.  William F. Buckley Jr. spent a lifetime fighting fringe elements on the right.

How bad is Ron Paul?  Consider this, from Human Events:

Right after the straw poll results showing Ron Paul as the winner were announced, people from Young Americans for Freedom began handing out memos declaring they had expelled Ron Paul from their advisory board. They didn’t just kick him out for non-payment of dues, or hogging the karaoke machine at the last YAF kegger, either.

“YAF’s concerns with Rep. Paul stem out of his delusional and disturbing alliance with the fringe anti-war movement,” the press release declared. Specifically, they’re upset about Paul’s “journey into the anti-war left by laying the blame on America for the unprovoked attacks of September 11th. Additionally, Rep. Paul has not condemned the 9/11 ‘Truther’ conspiracy theorists that support him, and he has repeatedly insisted that the United States not bring justice to those who have murdered thousands of our civilians and soldiers at home and abroad.”

Since none of that is really new coming out of Ron Paul, I’m not sure how he got onto the YAF National Advisory Board in the first place, but here we are.

COMMENT:  It's important that people who fancy Ron Paul as a conservative understand exactly who he is.  He is, as the British would call it, a nutter.  He would bring the Republican Party back to the isolationism of the 1930s, but he won't get that chance.

His son, Rand Paul, was just elected to the Senate from Kentucky, after being muffled for most of the campaign by his handlers because he kept embarrassing himself.  He continues to.

If either of the Pauls ever make it to the White House (it won't happen), look for property in Australia.

February 12, 2011