"Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican"
So there we have it: as with the rest of them, his loyalty to the Party supersedes his loyalty to his country. You see, he "is a Republican and he will always remain a Republican" , nevermind that he used to be a Libertarian in the past. He does not explain any further why exactly being inside the party of Dubya, Guiliani or McCain is more important than preventing a Fascist from sitting in the White House, from having imperial wars, mass poverty, the wholesale violation of civil right or a lunatic Federal Reserve bankrupting the USA.
Nevermind the raised $5'000'000+ still proudly displayed on the campaign website: the Revolution is over: very few Americans will ever take a seemingly principled candidate seriously again, not after this ugly about face. By not even trying to reach out to the other anti-war candidates (Kucinich, Gravel, Nader) and by rejecting even the possibility of a third party candidacy Ron Paul has shown not only his own moral limits but, even more importantly, the limits of hoping that the system can reform itself provided some well-intentioned people show up to do it. If anything good did come from the Ron Paul campaign, it is now the indisputable proof that:
1) any participation in the US political system, be it by running in it or by voting, only perpetuates it; the system cannot be reformed, redirected or otherwise salvaged: it needs to be completely destroyed.
2) unlike the British or Soviet empires, the USraelian Empire will not collapse from within: it can only be brought down from the outside. Unlike the British or the Russians, Americans simply do not have what it takes to get rid of their own ugly, evil, bloated and metastasizing Empire, no matter how "ubuesque" it has become.
So Ron Paul did an immense service to his country after all: he destroyed the last illusion any rationally thinking American could harbor in his heart about some politician working
within the system would bring about any change. For all the empty talk about revolution, McCain, Obama or Hillary will sit in the White House soon. The remaining choices are as meaningful as the choice between the SS and the SA in Hitler's Germany. For a while Gravel, Kucinich and Paul gave some of us the illusion that this might not really be the case. That illusion is now gone. As with any illusion - that is a good riddance.
