Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The Real Ron Paul Story: 8/16/2011 update

When I was a kid I went deep sea fishing once on one of those "pay a few bucks, get seasick, maybe land some fish" tours. My dad and I spent several hours bobbing around the Atlantic catching an occasional emaciated grouper, but otherwise fairly unoccupied. All of a sudden though a school of mackerel, hundreds of feet wide and as deep as I could see, appeared all around the boat. The sound of fishing line being yanked out of reels exploded as tourists started yanking in fish as quickly as they could get them out of the water. It went on like that for at least ten minutes as the massive group of mackerel passed, endless targets slowly pushing by, available for anyone to take. It was as easy as shooting fish in a bucket, only we were using lures instead of guns, and shooting them might have been slightly less cruel given that we, sometimes ineffectively, would whack our fish over the head before tossing them in a cooler.

That is sort of how I felt this weekend when Ron Paul came in a strong second to Michelle "Subservience means respect" Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll. Over the past few weeks I have been documenting the sporadic but measurable number of anti-Ron Paul or, more commonly, ignorant of Ron Paul, articles that have been kicking around in the press. But this Sunday the number of such media transgressions exploded into the stratosphere. I am not even sure where to begin with finding objections to the plethora (Thank you, "Three Amigos," for teaching me that word around about the same time I caught all those mackerel) of terrible stories that are out there right now. Everywhere I look I find tripe characterizing the GOP race as between three candidates with fantastically full bodied heads of hair, and not even a mention of Paul.

Other observers have already noted that Ron Paul was not invited to any of the Sunday morning talk shows. Or how about the fact that even Rick Santorum was getting a nod from the print media, while Paul is ignored? (By the way, Rick Santorum writes off Paul's chances to win the nomination, despite the fact his federalist, Washington tells you who to kiss in your own bedroom policies have zero chance of winning. He is posturing for a VP position to complement a less socially radical nominee; he is not running for the nomination).

I suppose instead of catching one of the easy fish and citing one of the hundreds of articles which ignored or marginalized Paul, I will do something I have only done occasionally. Here is an article which deserves applause for noting the failure of the press this weekend. It is not the excellent John Stewart bit about how the media is falling over themselves to ignore Paul. Instead it is a post from the neocon Washington Times, which somehow allowed Conor Murphy to- quite capably- explain that the fix is in against Paul.