Any Democrat Who Votes for Ron Paul Is Too Stupid to Live

I've been trying not to let Ron Paul occupy any significant amount of real estate in my brain and by and large I've succeeded, but recent developments make it necessary to think about him just long enough to point out that any Democrat who votes for Ron Paul is too stupid to live.

I've been assuming that if Paul runs a third-party candidacy, he would draw some (but very few) Democrats (the ones who are too stupid to live) but more Republicans; in fact, I argued as much in a couple of Steve M.'s comment threads. After all, apart from opposing the Iraq war, Paul is a wingnut's wingnut (Dave Neiwert has the details, including his legislative record). Abortion, immigration, taxes, gun control, public education, environmental protection, gay rights, minimum wage, Social Security--whatever it is, he's agin' it.

I figured his support for forced pregnancy¹ and opposition to gay rights² had the potential to attract a non-trivial number of authoritarian evangelicals unhappy with a philandering cross-dressing pro-abortion city slicker like Giuliani. I also figured, of course, that any Democrat who voted for Ron Paul would have to be too stupid to live. I figured the number of the former would be at least 2-3 times as great as the number of the latter.

Then today a Rasmussen poll covering a hypothetical 4-way race (Clinton, Giuliani, Paul, and Nader) included this bit: "Perhaps because of his position on the War in Iraq, Paul attracts more support from Democrats than Republicans." Which came as something of a shock to me, given that any Democrat who votes for Ron Paul is too stupid to live.

Steve M. wrote about the poll³:

It can't be a huge discrepancy -- in the last two-way Rasmussen poll, Hillary beat Rudy by six points, and in this poll she beats Rudy by three, even with Nader and Paul in the mix....Still, it's a sign that the Democrats are actually going to have to do a bit of work to frame Paul (accurately) as a wingnut if he does run in the general election.

Which is exactly right. Apparently there really is a non-trivial number of too-stupid-to-live-ocrats for whom the prospect of President Giuliani just isn't terrifying enough to motivate them to vote for whomever the Democrats nominate. People who stupidly think voting for Paul would actually express their true preferences, instead of expressing the exact opposite of every single progressive political preference except one. And somehow, some way, we have to make it clear to them (or to some non-trivial number of them) just how wrong they are.

Anyway, this is all sort of a long and rambling way to get to my main point, which is this: any Democrat who votes for Ron Paul is too stupid to live.

Any questions?



¹He sponsored bills to "provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception", and a constitutional amendment declaring "that the right to life vests in a human being from the moment of fertilization."
²He sponsored bills to prohibit the federal judiciary from handling claims arising from discrimination based on sexual orientation
³Steve did not say 'neener neener neener', even though he could have.