Posted on 10/23/2007 9:41:03 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
The ubiquitous and web-savvy supporters of Ron Paul now have one less forum in which to vent their rage.
The influential conservative blog Redstate.com placed a ban last night on all Paul commentary from readers who are recent arrivals to the blog.
Paul's followers are angry that the Libertarian congressman cant seem to get traction in national polls as he bids for the Republican presidential nomination.
Paul a representative from Texas who ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket remains mired in the low single digits.
The post on Redstate, Attention, Ron Paul Supporters (Life is *REALLY* Not Fair), begins, Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul. Those with accounts more than six months old may proceed as normal.
Redstate founder Erick Erickson said he woke up this morning bombed with hundreds of e-mails, the overwhelming majority very angry. His own readers, though, loved the ban.
It is the most recommended user diary in Redstate history, he said.
Paul's energetic online supporters managed to help him raise more than $5 million in the third quarter of this year, roughly tying Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Theyve also ticked off an awful lot of people, including, apparently, Leon H. Wolf at Redstate, who calls them annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting.
Wolf writes he is tired of responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans.
Erickson said that he and the regular Redstate readers had just had enough.
Theyre terribly annoying and they dont add to the debate. If people are adding to the debate we dont have a problem with them coming here. But theyre just coming to promote Ron Paul. They talk over everyone. They yell at everyone, he said.
Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said he questioned "the judgment of the decision," but added: "They are a private entity and they are certainly within their rights to do as they see fit.
"I'm sure there are a few Ron Paul supporters who get a little shrill," Benton said . "All we can control is what comes from our campaign."
The ban against Paul-supporting is not categorical, Erickson and Wolf made clear.
Hey, were sure *some* of Ron Pauls supporters really are Republicans. They can post at any one of a zillion Ron Paul online forums. Those who have *earned* our respect by contributing usefully for a substantial period of time will be listened to with appropriate respect. Those who have not will have to *earn* that respect by contributing usefully in the other threads ... and not mentioning Ron Paul. Given a month of solid contributing, send one of us an email and well consider lifting the restriction on your account, Wolf writes.
Wolf then shut down the comment thread for the post to avoid the deluge of irritation that was headed his way.
Erickson forwarded to Politico a number of the e-mails as examples of that irritation. You are banning FREE SPEECH. Perhaps next you can forbid discussion of Democratic candidate names. It is a sad day for America when hypocrites who think they are right try to shovel their propaganda onto the rest of us. What goes around comes around, wrote one reader with an e-mail exchange at socialheart.com.
Erickson finds this sort of complaint hypocritical itself. So much for their respect for private property, he said.
If you can't understand the term "context," then I suppose you won't ever understand how comments made in 1988 relate. I think that if you take Dr. Paul's comments as a whole, it's clear he does see differences between Republicans and Democrats. However, the differences aren't great enough.
Pardon me for not seeing the left wing message underneath the water where it should of been in the half empty glass. Good catch and my Mistake.
“Free Republic use to be a board of discussion..”
It still is, but Ron Paul wants to appease the Islamofascists by backing off and allowing them to take control of the Middle East. He has a growing Islamist support base. His supporters make the case that Arabs own the oil and should thus be able to control the oil. If control pertained only to race and a democratized area, it wouldn’t be such a problem. But he does not seem to understand that we cannot allow religious lunatics to control those resources.
“I was a big Buchanan supporter. I agree with your take on him. While the guy can be brilliant, his foreign policy views leave the reservation IMO, and dont return home often enough.”
So was I along time ago. I still agree with him on many things, but you are very right about his foreign policy. I think the most isolationistic of our Founding Fathers would change their tune if they were alive and confronting today’s threat.
along = a long
So far as I can tell, Ron Paul has no plan to run 3rd party. He is bound and determined to get Hillary elected.
Thanks. I agree with your take on our founding fathers. I think they would also.
I remember when Pat was 'Braveheart', and we all communicated on listservs.
Well, it is their oil. Believe it or not, we have our own, but getting the Federal GOvernment to permit drilling on half of the land west of the Mississippi (Which is Federally owned) has been a real chore. In addition, drilling on our Continental Shelves, with the exception of parts of the Gulf of Mexico has been blocked. Heck, we're importing oil from Canada and causing American producers to take a $30/bbl hit on prices because the pipelines are full of foreign oil.
Islam only has as much control as our government gives them.
If control pertained only to race and a democratized area, it wouldnt be such a problem. But he does not seem to understand that we cannot allow religious lunatics to control those resources.
As I said, the resources are theirs. We do have alternatives, we do not have to shell out billions to militarily secure the Islamic states, we have the option of drilling for our own, and all that would take is opening up some areas to exploration and letting the free market run its course right here at home.
In fact, with growing worldwide demand for the resources, the price is likely to decrease some and then remain reasonably stable even if we did not buy Islamic oil, which would keep the domestic oil industry strong enough to provide much more of what we need.
ANWR is just the tip of that iceberg.
I’m not sure that I do. I’ve forgotten some of the places where I used to participate.
Take it up with the environmentalists. It does not mean that we can allow Islamists to control resources.
“Islam only has as much control as our government gives them.”
How about we evoke the ghost of Thomas Jefferson and ask him to take back the Treaty of Tripoli, our first appeasement treaty with Muslims? (And while he’s at it, he could also take back the part Adams inserted about America not being a Christian nation.)
Islam was created to oppose and replace Judaism and Christianity 1400 years ago. It gained control over many minds during the centuries prior to the birth of America, and historically, is only peaceful when in power. It is an ideology that lends itself to violence no matter where it exists.
Nothing wrong with banning nutjob Ron Paul supporters. Websites are not a democracy.
It is being/has been/and will continue to be done.
There is a definite parallel.
Nothing the energy industries (oil/coal/nuclear) do is enough to get the enviros to relent.
Jump through the hoops and they move the bar.
In essence, there is only peace when they are in control, when the energy industry pays its dhimmi tax to the enviros.
Maybe we should just slaughter the enviros and convert them from dirt worship to Christianity, (/sarcastic reference to Ann Coulter's comment about islam, and ecowhackos everywhere).
It does not mean that we can allow Islamists to control resources.
The resources belong to the Islamists, whether we like that or not. It is their stuff. One of the first lessons I learned is you do not take someone else's stuff, whether it be their jelly beans, their toys in the sandbox, their homes for a condo complex (something the SCOTUS should revisit), and a fundamental rule ( as in: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods." and the old bellweather: "Thou shalt not steal.")
Now it may get your panties in a twist thinking of the Islamists having all that stuff, but it is their stuff.
My point is simply that we have our own stuff, don't need their damn stuff, and could be playing with our own, saving the tremendous cost (estimated at nearly $100/bbl when oil was a mere $20.00, not including the lives of our military personnel long before the current war) of securing the region so we can buy theirs.
The alternative is to kill them all and take theirs, while our domestic eco-jihadis run roughshod over the rest of us.
Now, I think we need to fight Islamists, simply because they have a long history of killing our people and breaking things which belong to us. That, however, does not change the fact that the resources of their countries are theirs, not ours. As long as those countries' resources are theirs, control of those resources is theirs, too, whether we like it or not.
“Now, I think we need to fight Islamists, simply because they have a long history of killing our people and breaking things which belong to us”
Then we agree.
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