Politics

More on the Paul/Romney Non-Alliance

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Lefty site ThinkProgress has added to the scrum of speculation about a Paul/Romney alliance with a chart--a chart!!--that "proves" (without giving a single example of what they count as an attack) that Ron Paul in the debates had never attacked Mitt Romney.

As I've written before, I certainly think these examples of Paul specifically criticizing specific things Romney said--on Afghanistan and the NDAA and military "spending cuts"--might qualify as "attacks" but again I have no idea what ThinkProgress's criteria are, so there's not much more I can say about that. Specific attacks on his opponents out of his own mouth, unless he's asked or is directly responding to a dumb thing his opponents just said, isn't a dominant part of Paul's style regardless.

I wrote at length about the lack of meat behind these alliance accusations here and here.

Here is the graphic for the Romney-attacking Moneybomb I wrote of in the first link above:

Jack Hunter at the Paul campaign web site quotes Rand Paul on his part in fanning people's suspicions about this "alliance":

The media speculation about some supposed cooperation between the Ron Paul campaign and Mitt Romney has gotten completely out of hand.…During a radio interview this morning in Chicago, Sen. Paul said:

"If there's a secret deal they're keeping it secret from me, I think that's mostly internet chatter and fun for people to speculate on…"…

I think the story kind of got misrepresented, because you know when I was asked, every time I'm asked these kind of questions, these are hypothetical questions, I always say you know what? I still have my first choice in the race and that's Ron Paul. My first choice would be a Ron Paul presidency and my first choice for a position would be an unofficial adviser to a Ron Paul presidency…

But when they push and push and push, and say 'What about Romney? Would you do it?' I mentioned that it would be an honor, and what I meant by that is sort of like if you were nominated for an academy award, what's your response? You'd say "It's be an honor to be nominated' and so I think it would be silly for me not to say that if anybody considered me that I'd be honored by it, but I think it was somewhat overblown, it sort of fits into this sort of cabal that people write about…

That there's this big strategy between Ron Paul and Romney, really the Ron Paul strategy as far as I'm aware of it is to gather delegates and to try to win, and one of the unwritten stories really is that Ron Paul may have already won a couple of states but people haven't realized it because the delegates haven't been allotted in Iowa yet, and we still think there's an reasonable chance we can win Iowa we they count the delegates, we think there's a reasonable chance we can win Maine when they count the delegates…

The world is full of dark mysteries and sneaky tricks, and it's possible Ron Paul's campaign is in secret alliance with Mitt Romney, the Axis Powers, Victor von Doom, and the Reptilians. Let's just say that the supposed evidence presented for it by his other opponents and press speculators doesn't prove their case.

Bonus Paulian: Paul "amuses" Momma, a tough crowd if ever there was one:

While "Momma" is not mentioned, you still might appreciate my forthcoming book, Ron Paul's Revolution.