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For my money--or, perhaps more accurately, money borrowed from my wife--the always brilliant Todd Seavey has written the best Ron Paul post-mortem around--incisive, funny and more than a little heartbroken. The whole thing is a must-read, but I found this bit toward the end particularly engaging:

Just this week, I had the confusing experience of talking to a Ron Paul delegate from New York who sees himself as basically a subversive liberal infiltrating the Republican convention and undermining it, not by supporting a candidate he truly likes but by supporting the candidate he thinks is craziest (due to beliefs like the gold standard, not the more recent racist revelations), the candidate who would be most embarrassing to the GOP. The delegate at first assumed, when I said I was no longer gung-ho about Paul, that I was also liberal (as many liberal New Yorkers are prone to do upon meeting anyone without horns and a pitchfork). Thus, it took several back-and-forth comments for each of us to figure out what the other actually believed ("supporting…but not really…would still love to see…sort of sad…" etc.). The guy is expecting to get some juicy interviews once he's "on the inside," apparently not understanding that convention-attending Republicans-Paul-supporters and otherwise-are more than happy to talk your ear off about what they believe without any need for subterfuge.

(Psst, c'mere man, let me tell you what I really think: we ought to get rid of the whole government, privatize every useful function and abolish the non-useful ones, make everything nice n' voluntary n' efficient, about 300 million times more responsive to people's individual needs than any majority vote could ever be - yeah, you know what I'm sayin'. Now do the secret handshake. Don't tell anybody I used to read comic books.)

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