Sorry FRiend, you can blame Ron Paul for a lot of stuff if you wish...plague of famine, frogs, locusts, but he is only 1/435 of one half of one of three levels of Gubmint.
The GOP is perfectly capable of wrecking itself and than resurrecting every few years when they get back to their core principles of limited government. Meyer, Buckley and Goldwater started the Conservative revival, Nixon ruined it by creating more Gubmint agencies like OSHA and the EPA, than Reagan performed CPR, than his VP promised "no new taxes" and his son gave us Medicare Part D and an amnesty bill. When they get back to their roots, they will win.
"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are travelling the same path".
--Ronald Reagan