I’ve had a feeling of rage building up inside of me the last several days, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

Y’know, I think I have.

Before I attempt to explain it, here’s the latest from the Dr. Ron Paul Campaign:

Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s presidential campaign is out with a new ad today featuring former patients of Paul, who as an OB-GYN has delivered more than 4,000 babies.

The 60-second Web video features Laura Mays and three other former patients of Paul’s medical practice in Brazoria County, Texas. They attest to Paul’s character as a doctor and as a politician.

“Some people need to have a good word said about them,” Mays says. “Ron is the sort of person that, his life is his good word.”

Kara Gore, another former patient, says Paul “not only protects unborn life, but he also walks through journeys with women.”

The ad is an attempt to highlight Paul’s opposition to abortion, a position that is often overshadowed by his libertarian-style views on monetary and foreign policy.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said in a statement that the ad “is a clear case of credible subject matter serving as its own convincing message.”

Nothing like a fresh coat of whitewash to repackage a worn-out, old structure.

According to Warner Todd Houston, in an article published by the Canadian Free Press,  even Sherwin Williams doesn’t have enough whitewash to cover Herr Docktor’s issues:

Last year Ron Paul said that the CIA perpetrated a coup over the United States. “There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup. They’re in businesses, in drug businesses.” That fits in as just another part of the wacky world of Ron Paul that has spanned decades of denigrating blacks, assigning all sorts of crazy conspiracies to the US government, and above all hatred for Israel. It is a disgusting sin that this man is a political candidate for anything much less for the GOP nomination for President of the United States.

A lot of the credit for exposing the worst of Paul’s outrages belongs to James Kirchick who in 2008 wrote a short piece for The New Republic detailing what he found in an archive of Ron Paul’s racist newsletters.

Also back in 2008, then Fox News host John Gibson had a must hear interview with Kirchick asking why so many white supremacists and racists were in such slavish support of Ron Paul when he ran for president in 2008.

Aside from his racist newsletters, Kirchick notes that in 1994, Paul predicted a “holocaust” against South African whites and then advocated for a separate white state in South Africa. Kirchick also says Paul seemed to support the same thing in America.

This week Kirchick wrote a follow up piece on Paul’s 1970s era newsletters that is much more informative than his 2008 piece. In the piece published by The Weekly Standard Kirchick gives a lot more examples of the sort of racist nonsense these newsletters disgorged onto subscribers.

Paul defends himself against the contents of his newsletters by claiming that he never much bothered to read what was being published under his name by his various publishing firms and projects. He then claims not to have supported the racism and off the wall conspiracy theories contained in them.

Kirchick sums his latest piece up with this:

Paul’s more mainstream supporters have always explained away his popularity with 9/11 “Truthers” as an unfortunate consequence of his altruistic, if at times naive, libertarian ethos: The man just loves freedom so much that he’s loath to turn away backers who may think differently from him. To anyone who bothers to look into Ron Paul’s record, that claim is simply not credible.

…What it reveals to me is the utter shame that Ron Paul is thought to be a worthy candidate in any GOP primary for any position whatever. I tend to see that his fan base of racists, Jew haters, and conspiracy nuts don’t tend to vote for the most part and in talking to many of his ardent — and cultic — supporters over the last few years I see people that do not fit in at all with the rest of the GOP. In fact, in talking to his supporters I find few of them have any knowledge at all of politics outside of “Doctor Paul’s” take on it. They see the whole world through the Paul prism and aren’t well informed otherwise. I also feel that most of them will just fade away once Paul himself finally goes away in 2012 (Paul announced that he won’t run for reelection to his House seat, so unless he wins the White House his political career seems to be over).

To which Reagan Conservatives across the nation would say:  Hallelujah!

I guess my rage is two fold.

Part 1 concerns the following news from rasmussenreports.com:

The new Rasmussen Reports survey of Iowa caucus participants shows Romney on top with 25% of the vote followed by Paul at 20% and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 17%. Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, both at 10%, are the only other candidates in double-digits. Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann earns six percent (6%), former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman four percent (4%), while one percent (1%) prefer some other candidate and eight percent (8%) are not sure.

20%?  Has somebody been injecting the  Iowa corn with tequila or have y’all been smoking the husks?

Do you folks in Iowa not recognize a cranky old isolationist nutjob when you see one?

The second part of my rage has to do with the infiltration of strident, tin foil hat-wearing, Mom’s basement-dwelling, Ron Paul followers into mainstream Conservative websites’ comment sections, where they immediately attempt to treat the site like the ballot box at CPAC, in an attempt to convey a false -bravado powered representation of their Paulian worship, antisemitism, name-calling, and foreign policy naivete as somehow representing the views of the majority of Americans.

Yes, you Paulbots have a right to your opinions, but not to point of accomplishing the written equivalency of stuffing the ballot box at CPAC.

While I believe that Ron Paul has about as much chance of becoming president as Lindsey Lohan does of sobering up,  if some of you are having second thoughts about Ron Paul, remember what President Ronald Wilson Reagan said:

We can not play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.