Andrew Malcolm was displaying some wishful thinking on his blog, or perhaps channeling his inner Paulnut, when he wrote this piece which implies that Paul’s cult of Communist/Libertarian/Pacifist/Minute Men would be embarrassing anyone but themselves at the R.N.C. convention with an attempt to hijack the G.O.P. and turn it into a less coherent version of the Libertarian Party:

But in the meantime, quietly, largely under the radar of most people the forces of Rep. Ron Paul and his libertarian-minded GOP backers are collecting delegates at the local level and planning a revolt against Sen. John McCain at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September

Paul’s presidential candidacy has been correctly dismissed all along in terms of winning the nomination. He was even excluded as irrelevant by Fox News from a nationally-televised GOP debate in New Hampshire.

But what’s been largely overlooked is Paul’s candidacy as a reflection of a powerful lingering dissatisfaction with the Arizona senator among the party’s most conservative conservatives. As anticipated a month ago in The Ticket, that situation could be exacerbated by today’s expected announcement from former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nod, a slot held by Paul in 1988.

Nevermind Ralph Nader, Republican and Democratic parties both face….

…potentially damaging internal splits that could cripple their chances for victory in a narrow vote on Nov. 4.

Just take a look at recent Republican primary results, largely overlooked because McCain locked up the necessary 1,191 delegates long ago. In Indiana, McCain got 77% of the recent Republican primary vote, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who’ve each long ago quit and endorsed McCain, still got 10% and 5% respectively, while Paul took 8%.

On the same May 6 in North Carolina, McCain received less than three-quarters of Republican votes (74%), while Huckabee got 12%, Paul 7% and Alan Keyes and No Preference took a total of 7%.

Pennsylvania was even slightly worse for the GOP’s presumptive nominee, who got only 73% to a combined 27% for Paul (16%) and Huckabee (11%).

Paul did reasonably well in one state where if it was two person race he still would have been trounced, in other primaries his best showing is to average 7% (including Libertarians and “independents” who registered to vote for him) and he and his cult are going to embarrass the G.O.P. establishment?

It’s they who should be embarrassed, not given more credit than they deserve. Alan Keyes has run a much more successful campaign to challenge Republicans to examine their values and he did it without getting the morons from Digg to donate all their money to him. What Ron Paul has done is cobbled together a coalition of fringe groups from all parts of the political spectrum, including neo-Nazis and Anarchists, and milked those suckers for all they’re worth.

Malcolm goes on to lay out the movie villain-like aspirations Paul has for his army of pot-smoking web nerds:

They hope to demonstrate their disagreements with McCain vocally at the convention through platform fights and an attempt to get Paul a prominent speaking slot. Paul, who’s running unopposed in his home Texas district for an 11th House term, still has some $5 million in war funds and has instructed his followers that their struggle is not about a single election, but a longterm revolution for control of the Republican Party.

Who wouldn’t want a party controlled by rape loving racists, sex tourists, gangs of stalkers, Communists pretending to be Libertarians, Islamists pretending to be Libertarians and of course Andrew Sullivan.

At Hot Air Allahpundit puts the Ron Paul “revolution” in focus for those duped by the small but vocal Paulites:

One look at the delegate count should make the scope of the nascent revolution clear. Paul has won all of 26 delegates. Even if he wangled a few dozen more through manipulations in caucus states like Nevada, at best he’ll come up with 100 delegates in a 2,200-delegate convention. That’s not a revolution, it’s a lunatic fringe.

Hey, if you’re a Libertarian that’s fine. Vote Libertarian. But Ron Paul has hooked you marks into helping him with his doomed plan to seize control of the G.O.P. and become the Conservative version of Lyndon Larouche.

Paul will never convince Republicans that Isolationism and rolling back the military will make us safe. Isolationism didn’t keep us safe from a militarized Japan in WW II and it won’t keep us safe from Militarized communist and Islamist regimes who are even now dreaming of rolling their tanks into Times Square. And thankfully the “revolution” will never convince Republicans or the rest of America that our best defense is to rely on fighting spirit of effeminate, immature drug abusers, sorry I meant Libertarians, to turn back the tide of an invading army.

7% of people on the right (and it this case that number includes people so far left they just seem to be on the right) agree with Paul’s fevered fantasy of a new revolution. I think I speak for the other 93% when I say count us out.

Well, technically they aren’t suspected of necrophilia per se but we all know these things happen in baby steps. From The Chon:

Two men and a juvenile are accused of digging up a corpse, decapitating the body and using the head to smoke marijuana, according to court documents.

Matthew Gonzalez and Kevin Jones have been charged with the misdemeanor offense of abuse of a corpse, said Scott Durfee, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorneys Office.

According to documents filed in the case, Gonzalez, Jones and an unnamed juvenile on March 15 went to an Humble cemetery, dug up a man’s grave, left with the head and turned it into a “bong.”

Gonzalez told authorities about the incident Wednesday, and showed officers the defaced grave, including a 4-foot hole. Because of a heavy rain, officers were unable to determine whether the casket or the body had been disturbed.

Just good clean fun right tokers? But don’t worry, this has nothing to do with pot. After all Brian77008 says in the comments:

This is disgusting. But make no mistake. Pot did not make these guys go out and dig up a corpse and do this. They did it because they are inherently bad people.

Of course. I recall hundreds of cases where “bad people” dug up graves and stole skulls to drink beer out of or eat their cereal from. Getting high has absolutely nothing to do with what police suspect to be up to four people stealing a skull to smoke pot from. Nothing.

The Chron has a longer article on the story detailing how this ring of petty thieves ended up getting caught. Police believe the person who originally admitted tot the desecration, Kevin Wade Jones, thought it would distract police from questioning him about car break-ins. Really:

The Kingwood teenager’s story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.

Yet, Kevin Wade Jones Jr., 17, appeared almost indifferent as he relayed the bizarre description of his and two friends’ activities at an Humble area graveyard, Adkins said.

“I just doubted it because it’s very morbid, and I couldn’t see anybody doing something like this,” Adkins said Thursday.

Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood 17-year-old, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.

“He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it,” Adkins said. “So I knew there was some truth to the story.”

Now, Jones, Gonzalez and a juvenile whose name has not been released are each charged with abuse of a corpse, a misdemeanor. All three were arrested Wednesday night.

Police said a fourth suspect is wanted for questioning.

[…]

The teens first came to police’s attention during a vehicle burglary investigation. While being questioned, Jones told of desecrating the gravesite a month or two ago. Adkins said he believes the tale was intended to distract police from the vehicle break-in.

Jones claimed he and his friends used shovels to dig up the body and removed the corpse’s head with a garden tool, Adkins said. Jones also revealed he and the other two boys took the severed head to the juvenile’s home, where they used the skull as a “bong” to smoke marijuana, the officer said.

Read the rest. The grave the cops found disturbed belonged to an 11-year-old boy named Willie Simms who died in 1921 and the graveyard may or may not be set aside for Black WWI and WWII veterans who died. No one seems to know much about it.

Hmmm. Desecrating the grave of a child in a mysterious cemetery no one maintains or knows anything about. Sounds like a great idea unless you believe in vengeful spirits haunting the living.

I’ve had teachers like this before, luckily none of them ever thought to sue me for not believing their nonsense. From The Wall Street journal:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the “problems” owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was “intolerant of ideas” and “questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.” Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Venkatesan’s insistence on her students’ acceptance of her fevered post-modernism reminds me a little of a class I took with in Narrative Non-Fiction with Lisa Jarnot, who is a very pleasant woman and an excellent poet but who literally spent a week of the class trying to convince us that there was no such thing as fixed gender. Not fixed gender roles mind you, which it can be reasonably argued by any rational person, but no fixed sex. It was an odd experience but actually not one that was as bad as many teachers would have made it and I actually quite enjoyed the class and my conversations with Lisa.

For her part though she no doubt sensed my skepticism of some of her ideas she graded me fairly and we parted amicably. I in fact did some of my best writing in that class.

The main difference between a Priya Venkatesan and a Lisa Jarnot is class. I’m sorry to say that on many a university campus there are students and faculty alike who are spoiled, thin skinned, and so utterly classless that the mere suggestion of criticism becomes ground for legal action, or at the very least a childish tantrum.

Stories like the one in the Journal would be amusing if it didn’t have such a deleterious effect on the academic environment:

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about “interrogating heteronormativity,” or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It’s effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

Indeed. And it is painfully obvious that the college student of today isn’t learning critical thinking, the scientific method or Gods forbid, to be an expert in a subject. Today’s students are learning that college is largely an exercise in irrelevance, boredom and hackery and we owe them much more than that.

h/t Don’t tase Me Bro!

Just looking for links for another story when I found a comment on this story at a Communist/Islamist website called War in Iraq. They have a history of posting crazy nonsense, including articles by the conspiracy mongering con artist who makes a living off the now debunked Satanic Panic Cathy O’Brien which claim George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Hilary Clinton and basically every famous person within 100 miles of her sexually abused her and her daughter as part of a C.I.A. mind control program.

Her articles are published in the “Historical analysis and Facts” section.

That’s just to give you a taste of the kinds of people who frequent the site, and of course I don’t claim that the following comment can be attributed to all Obama supporters, but it is interesting that he is appealing to a demographic that most people would have written off as die-hard Ron Paul supporters.:

Why Americans are ‘bitter’
by Econ on 14.04.2008 [16:11 ]
The connection between the collapse of the US economy and the costly Iraq war is one the US jew controlled media have been desperately trying to hide from the functional illiterates in America.

The rise in oil prices is one devastating result of the failed US jew war in Iraq.

The Iraq war has long been economically self-defeating for the US, but the chorus of dual warmongering jews who control the US media, the politicians in DC through AIPAC, israel-firsters and the usual jew apologists in America keep are the onescalling for US troops to remain in Iraq.

Barack Obama was one of the first public officials to make the connection on the $12-$20 billion a month the US is spending there when the money is needed at home.

The same argument can said for foreign aid to that shithole.

Why is American borrowing money and running up huge deficits and must fund that shithole for billions each year when the money is needed at home.

Foreign aid hasn’t become an issue yet, but it is soon to become one in the US election.

The right person just have to ask the right question.
This is one reason why the people selected to ask questions at Presidential debates are carefully selected to prevent such questions from being asked.

This is why the jews have started a smear campaign in a futile attempt to get a more pro-jew candidate elected like Hillary who will be easier to blackmail and extort for aid to israel.

The jews are desperately trying to find some ‘wedge’ issue to divide and conquer and promote ethnic hate in the hopes that the true cause of the US ecomomic anxiety is not exposed, and a pro-agenda can be advanced.

The reason Americans are bitter is that their jobs are gone and irrelevant issues such as gun control, abortion and immigration are used to mask the economic problems.

Rev. Wright was an issue that backfired for the jews. The goal there was to link Wright to Farrakan in the usual guilty by association method in the hopes that Americans would respond in the usual knee-jerk reaction to pro-jew propaganda.

Wright is a decorated US military veteran who served his country, that can hardly be said of most jews in the US.

The latest wedge issue seems to be the nuanced use of the words
‘bitter’ and ‘cling’ in a recent Obama speech.

It is so transparent HOW the jews are using an irrelevant issue with the futile hope that HIllary, the more pro-jew candidate, will get the nomination.

It is hillarious to watch and Hillary and the jews become even more hysterical.

Americans are laughing at the ignorant jews as it is getting harder and harder to manipulate the American electorate with the usual pro-jew shenanigans.

The people in Pennslyvania are wondering how the jew governor has all the time in the world to appear every 2 minutes on cable tv to promote Hillary when he should be doing something to help the unemployed in that state and fight crime.

It is no wonder that rural Americans are ‘bitter’ when they watch the massive foreign aid money that is given to prop up the jewish shithole in Palestine.

Instead of spending resources on rural Americans after their jobs were outsourced, more attention is paid to the survival of jews that the vast majority of Americans don’t care about.

The usual jew smear tactics just aren’t working this time around because of the internet.

Once the jew smear is started, Americans go to the internet to get a balanced view of the issue, the one-sided pro-jew bias is now evaporating.

Yowza. By no means indicative of all Obama supporters (I hope) but isn’t it interesting how Obama appeals to people one would think were disinterested in “post-partisanship” and Hope.

The above commenter manages to incorporate Obama’s elitism with a backward bigotry to produce an endorsement of a candidate so obscene I think it surpasses the Rape loving Racists for Paul website in sheer repulsiveness.

The question is why is a person this hateful attracted to Obama at all? I’d suggest that until Obama divests himself of the more radical of his associations, his core of support will increasingly include people like the bigot above.

Damn the Bush economy which leaves people struggling to live paycheck to paycheck. Struggling so hard that an affluent White girl can make a living putting on an old jacket and begging those struggling workers for money by a freeway overpass.

And by “make a living” I mean clean up to the tune of $50 bucks an hour because the average donation to her is about $2.50. In my day a panhandler with a particularly poignant hard luck story was lucky to get a couple of quarters from somebody. With a recession looming and Bushco/Capitalism/The Jews driving America into the poor house, these people must be generous indeed to part with the hard earned money they virtually have to pry from the greedy grasping fingers of their evil corporate overlords.

It’s like they don’t know they’re poor:

Watch it again for it to sink in. The average American driving around can afford to just throw money at some kid with a sob story. Big money.

In the 90s if some young lady wanted to not work for whatever reason but needed cash it was off to the strip club with her, and frankly the ones who were, shall we say more Rubin-esque, weren’t pulling down $50 bucks an hour.

Tell me again how Americans can”t afford health insurance, can’t pay their mortgages and can barely put food on the table. Americans, even in the face of the declining dollar and rising prices, can basically piss their money away on any sad sack who makes a living depending on the kindness of strangers.

The worst part about the story, however, is that this girl’s perfidy will make people leery to give to folks that really need it. Although it is rarely a good idea to give money to street people, as many are drug addicted and it might be your cash that buys them the fix that kills them, there are many people who need help and Americans should always be willing to help their fellows by volunteering, supporting charity and donating to soup kitchens.

h/t Neatorama