Derbyshire explains the Paul appeal

Sometimes, being crazy is the only sane option:

The first vote I ever cast was for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Today, I look at the Huge Government Republican establishment in Washington D.C., and read its enablers … and I have no idea who these people are, or what happened to the GOP I signed on with.

I’m in construction and get paid by the hour, so a twenty five dollar donation to Dr. Paul is roughly one pre-tax hour of my labor.

So here’s the deal: for every two weeks that Ron Paul is in the race, he gets the fruit of an hour of my time and effort. And every time another member of the conservative intelligentsia disparages Dr. Paul’s campaign for a limited and constitutional government, it will just make hitting the send button that much sweeter.

Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?

Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood (“Press one for English …”), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.

If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I’m for liberty, too. That’s why I’m for Ron Paul.

I look at those people too, the Giulianis, McCains, Romneys and Huckabees of the world, and wonder how on Earth it is possible that they are able to convince anyone of their nonsense after nearly two decades of consistent betrayal of republican principles by Huge Government Republicans. Do you, does anyone, actually believe that there is a single candidate in the race who will seriously try to reduce the size of the federal government besides Ron Paul?

Because I can absolutely guarantee you, they will not.