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” No one’s worried about RP winning the GOP nomination; they’re worried about him going Ind. with his big pile of cash and siphoning enough votes away from the GOP nominee in battleground states to tilt the election to the Donkey nominee. ...a justifiable concern, given our evenly divided country (electorally).”

This is a bankrupt line of reasoning.

I’m not voting for Romney. Or Giuliani. Or McCain. Or Huckabee. None of them are acceptable candidates to me. If this is the best the party can pick, then I am not going to support their candidate.

Why?

Because if I do, I’ll be told by the same people who chastise about not supporting the nominee, no matter whom it is, that “I knew what he stood for when I voted for him.” This is what I have been told on various threads about Bush when I mentioned a pile of his forgotten campaign promises that he never delivered on, or did the opposite about.

And I won’t be the only one.

If Paul gets significant 3rd party support from Republicans, it’s because the party is not meeting the needs of it’s base.

I don’t support Paul’s foreign policy, but I do support his message of liberty through limited government. The big government nanny state pork loving globalist Republican establishment fears that.

“RP’s no concern at all as long as he keeps his word and doesn’t make an Ind. run.”

I hope our party doesn’t nominate benedict mccain, flip mitt, the huckster, or julie annie.

I don’t support Paul’s foreign policy, but I do support his message of liberty through limited government.

It is remarkable how much hatred for Ron Paul is generated because of this fundamental stance against the Second Coming of Lyndon Johnson in the person of another Texan, George W. Bush.

Had he campaigned for this outrageous spending and debt he's piled up, he could never have been elected. The GOP leadership in the party would have treated him as a radioactive leper.

Military spending aside, the only record we can compare his discretionary spending to is that of LBJ, another guns-and-butter war president. And at the end of Bush's term, we face the threat of inflation and recession and a major banking crisis over global loss of confidence in our currency and our complete lack of fiscal discipline. And under a Republican president!

I prefer Ron Paul's approach: declare the war (to prevent the other party from defecting before it's won as the Dims have done), wage it to win without any quarter for the enemy, win it on terms of unconditional surrender, then bring the troops home (not garrison it as part of a neocolonial system for the next fifty years or more at taxpayer expense).

And Ron Paul won't run the dollar into the ground by using printing presses to favor the central banks and their irresponsible lending practices.

I don’t support Paul’s foreign policy, but I do support his message of liberty through limited government.

I also support his limited-gov't positions. But his appeasement-first, intellecutally bankrupt foreign policy stances immediately disqualify him from consideration in my book.

As far as your contention that RP supporters won't be voting GOP anyway, that may be true from some but it's certainly not true for all. So yes, his going third party could very well affect the general election. If RP goes back on his word and decides to go Ind. hopefully he'll be offset by third party liberals (like Bloomberg) who'll siphon votes away from the Dem nominee.

Point is, the concern in GOP circles about Paul centers not around the primaries but around the general.