Ron Paul lost the 2008 nomination for your sins

Last week, President Barack Obama scheduled a speech before a joint session of Congress on a new jobs plan (I guess because there aren’t any more new jobs anywhere), and it happened to coincide with the next GOP debate.

When Speaker of the House John Boehner told him that wouldn’t work out, Obama said, “Oh, that’s fine, we can do it the next day,” which in both the attempt and subsequent acquiescence sort of tells you everything you need to know about how this presidency is going. Now Obama gets to speak opposite Green Bay and New Orleans in the NFL opener instead of a collection of cheeseheads and nominal saints.

Ah, well.  I’m more excited than I thought I’d be by the Republican debate, now that it feels like there’s really a campaign going on. I know people have been announcing their candidacies for a while now, and some have been running for president in a more or less official capacity since 2009, but it wasn’t anything serious until recently, and by that I mean Gov. Rick Perry throwing his rhinestone cowboy hat into the ring.

Look, unless Perry gets caught with a dead girl or live boy, he’s got the Republican nomination wrapped up. At this point, he could probably survive having to deny he has carnal knowledge of his pet sow.

The only drama left is who’s going to perform well enough to be vice presidential material (my money is on Michelle Bachmann), and how Perry is going to duck out of all of these upcoming debates. (He might ask for everyone’s college transcripts, but that’s a gamble. Comparisons to his own are unlikely to be kind.)

And the only entertainment left is going to be listening to Ron Paul’s zigs while everyone else zags. College students have died of alcohol poisoning playing the “Ronald Reagan” drinking game watching GOP debates, where you take a drink every time someone agrees with or compliments the Gipper, but with Paul you never know. He might remind everyone Reagan invaded Grenada and gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. He might say Reagan grew the government and the debt, and raised taxes overall. That’s the thing; you don’t know what he might bring up. He’s crazy.

In 2007 and 2008, I was a big Ron Paul fan. The guy talks like no one else talks, and he’s so savvy a politician he sounds anything but a savvy politician. When he says, “We need to stop policing the world,” or “we need to cut spending,” you get the feeling he means it because he takes typical government conservatism and cheerfully and openly extends it to its logical terminus. (Government socialism is bad, so let’s get to work on dismantling Social Security; universal health care is bad, so let’s phase out Medicare and Medicaid.)

In my college years, I watched a lot of his YouTube videos, and planned to vote in the primary for him. Alpine at that time was full of Ron Paul yard signs, so it was very much The Thing To Do.

The only thing that changed my mind was going to a meet up of about two dozen other supporters and discovering a healthy majority of them were pretty sure 9/11 was an inside job committed under the direction of the Illuminati/Trilateral Commission/SPECTRE. Then I kind of had to sit down and re-examine where I was in life.

But I still enjoyed his debates and interviews, and apparently so did many others who coalesced into the Tea Party during the last four years.

Who knows? If we’re lucky, maybe Perry will pick him as VP.