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Opinion: Ron Paul’s campaign may be out of T-shirts but not dedication

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This just in: The Ron Paul 2008 campaign store is closed indefinitely. Apparently this week’s special ‘End of Primary Season Blowout’ sale decimated the inventory.

The special offer was $25 for a Ron Paul T-shirt plus an unspecified collection of Ron Paul buttons, Ron Paul stickers, Ron Paul key chains, Ron Paul magnets, Ron Paul wristbands, Ron Paul hats and Ron Paul mouse pads.

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It looked like a campaign close-out.

But with his $5-million remaining political kitty, the 72-year-old, 10-term Republican representative from Texas continues to make his combination political-book signing rounds of the country and speaking to crowds of his determined followers, many of them new to the political process.

Paul will have ample time to do that this year because he’s running for his 11th House term unopposed. There simply is no Democrat in southeast Texas stupid enough to take on the old man who inserts bounteous spending earmarks for his home district into legislation certain to pass and then votes against the bills so he can maintain his anti-spending reputation.

Paul didn’t do all that badly in the meaningless Republican primary votes this week, if you deal in percentages. Paul captured ...

... 17% of GOP ballots in South Dakota, 14% in New Mexico and 22% in Montana. Unfortunately for the Revolution, that adds up to something around 50,000 votes total.

But that’s about 50,000 more than awarded to that ex-New York mayor fellow who the know-nothing media dubbed the Republican front-runner for so long. Same goes for that ex-Massachusetts governor, that ex-Arkansas governor, that ex-Virginia governor, that ex-Wisconsin governor and that ex-Tennessee senator. They’ve all gone bye-bye.

And Paul proudly remains standing. Or sitting when he’s signing book after book.

But in case you think a million or more Paul votes and a million or more votes for Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate, don’t matter, just remember the name Ralph Nader and the words: Florida 2000.

In case you’ve fallen behind on your Ron Paul news because you were paying attention to the endless silliness over on the Democratic side of the country’s political spectrum that may well determine the Nov. 4 outcome, the Ron Paul campaign has assembled a 22-minute and 35-second videotape of the former ob-gyn signing lots of his books at the head of long lines of excited fans.

The tape also includes adoring excerpts of his extemporaneous, repetitious remarks before modest but enthusiastic and cheering crowds.

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Paul says he is even more optimistic today about the prospects of revolution in America than he was when he reluctantly began his presidential bid a year ago and found himself the beneficiary of nearly $35 million in donations from hundreds of thousands of vocal supporters and trolls who prowled the Internet on his behalf, provoking some political websites to ban them as comment-posting pests.

The Ticket, on the other hand, welcomes all commenters except those who swear a lot or write about bodily functions or talk about our parents, who weren’t from Texas. To be honest, most of the Paul people are great.

We’ll put a copy of that special video at the end of this item in case anyone needs a nap.

Paul, who was the unsuccessful Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1988, is against a lot of things: big government, the Iraq war, abortion, the Federal Reserve and giving up any rights whatsoever in the name of national security. Also, Paul is against the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party that he refuses to leave, Sen. John McCain.

Paul is in favor of drastically downsized government and bringing all U.S. troops back stateside. He’s also in favor of selling his new book, ‘The Revolution: A Manifesto.’ And he’s been quite successful at that, according to numerous best-seller lists.

Even if each of the 1-million-plus primary voters who supported him bought only one copy of the book, Paul will do better than those smarmy, New Age authors thatOprah chooses for her book club. (And we all know which candidate she supports, and which Democrat she does not support.)

Many Paul backers have left comments on The Ticket saying they’ve purchased six or seven copies of Paul’s treatise to foist on friends.

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On the videotape, Paul says he is also in favor of countless thousands of his supporters descending on Minneapolis in September to demonstrate calmly and peacefully but in extremely large numbers to show the Republican National Convention and the national media the scale of those people who truly want the lost GOP to return to its conservative, strict constitutionalist roots.

Unfortunately for Paul, if those countless thousands do indeed show up as he urges in Minneapolis, no one will notice. That’s because the Republican National Convention is next door in the city of St. Paul.

--Andrew Malcolm

Photo Credits: Associated Press; Nick Wass/Associated Pres

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