There’s something mildly attractive about perennial presidential candidate Ron Paul. He’s been around so long, as you can tell from his weathered face (photo above). And he’s so cheerfully persistent. And he has never wavered in his political message: scrap the federal government and all its works.

He keeps promising to bring American troops home and close all those costly military bases around the globe, and I, for one, can’t see anything wrong with that.

And he would abolish such nuisances as the federal  Income Tax (hooray!).

He also loathes the Federal Reserve, which every right-thinking American should do. The Fed is a quaint anachronism and causes a lot more harm than good. Canada dumped its version of the Fed back in 1938, and I think this is one reason America’s northern neighbor didn’t experience the financial horrors of 2008.

So far so good, but there’s more. And it gets kind of ugly.

Nobody in their right mind would seriously contemplate a nation of more than 300 million people without an effective central government. With the kind of weak center that Ron Paul advocates, America would become a collection of nation states with widely disparate laws and regulations. And the resulting conglomerate would have less international clout than Argentina or Venezuela.

And that’s not the only reason to dismiss Paul as a crackpot.

In an article yesterday in AlterNet, Adele M. Stan details the would-be president’s views, and they’re bizarre. Here’s an excerpt:

He’s the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. He’s an anti-reproductive-rights Republican. He’s a gay-demonizing Republican. He’s an anti-public education Republican and an anti-Social Security Republican. He’s the John Birch Society’s favorite congressman. And he’s a booster of the Constitution Party, which has a Christian Reconstructionist platform. So, if you’re a member of the anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality, anti-education, pro-communist-witch-hunt wing of the progressive movement, I can see how he’d be your guy.

Click here to read the article.

Isn’t that a weird resume for the former head of the Libertarian Party? I thought Libertarians wanted to be left alone and were prepared to leave the rest of us alone, too.

The way I see it, Ron Paul is no Libertarian. He’s just another mean-spirited Grinch who is too stingy to fund anything – including wars.