In his latest syndicated column Jonah Goldberg comes up with a novel argument against the Ron Paul candidacy: Ron is (supposedly) not very persuasive! He says he agrees with a lot of what Ron says, but if he is elected president he won’t be able to persuade enough members of Congress to cut back on government.

Therefore, Goldberg implies, conservatives should support one of the six Republican stooges who, unlike Ron Paul, don’t actually believe in the core conservative principle of limited constitutional government but only talk about it — whenever Democrats are in power, not when they hold the White House.

Let’s see now. Ron Paul has been persuasive enough to be reelected a dozen times in his rural Texas congressional district despite the fact that he is in favor of ending all farm welfare programs. He has been persuasive enough to be Number One in the Iowa polls less than a week from the Iowa Caucuses and near the top in national polls. He has been persuasive enough to incite thousands of people to volunteer endless hours working for his election. He has been persuasive enough to active-duty military personnel to be the top recipient of campaign donations from them, receiving more donations from active-duty military people than ALL THE OTHER REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES COMBINED. He has been persuasive enough to have authored several New York Times bestsellers. He has been persuasive enough to have become a YouTube sensation. He has been persuasive enough to shock the entire Washington establishment by collecting tens of millions of dollars in small, individual campaign donations in fundraising “money bombs” organized by strangers. And he is clearly more persuasive than Jonah Goldberg is when he argues that Ron Paul is not persuasive.

Of course, the real reason the Jonah Goldbergs of the world busy themselves with dreaming up dumb articles like his latest is that they know that Ron Paul will not participate in the murder of thousands of innocent Iranians and Syrians, and the death of thousands more of American soldiers, with another trumped-up, phony war like the one in Iraq that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending Americans against anything.

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