Hope when it seems all hope is lost is one of the great paradoxes of human behavior and I have never seen this to be truer than during the presidential primaries this year. I have witnessed something this year that I never would have even thought about previously – the Big Media essentially choosing who is a viable candidate and who is not.

At all the debates the candidates who, to paraphrase Joe Biden, use sentences that consist of three things: a noun, a verb, and “change” get all the air time. While candidates that have something to say, whether it be wise and sagacious Ron Paul, blunt and stupid Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, or somewhere in between Dennis Kucinich, get practically no air time and in the case of Congressman Paul get consistently cut off when addressing the issues.

But where the others have since dropped out of the race Ron Paul remains and the “Paultards” (I am proud to say I’m one them) remain hopeful despite the media’s decision that he cannot win. Why do we still have hope when things are going wrong and we’ve gotten all the bad breaks (like practically no media coverage since before the Iowa caucus)?

The short answer is that we believe in freedom: the freedom to live our lives as we see fit and to not be bossed around by bureaucrats; to be safe from a reinstituted draft; to keep all the money we earn and not have it taken by the government and given to special interests.

Other reasons I have found to support Ron Paul are:

One: He has promised to end the IRS and the income tax. This means a huge reduction in federal revenue. Most importantly, he has also proposed reducing government spending to go with it.

Two: No more empire: Paul proposes bringing troops home not only from Iraq, but from Germany, Korea and all the other 130 countries American forces are stationed in. American intervention has usually done more harm than good,. We say, “freedom and democracy,” but we mean “tyranny and despotism.”

American foreign policy has never promoted democracy except in Europe and Japan. We supported Syngman Rhee in Korea (and the CIA allowed him to escape justice) and we propped up another dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, in South Vietnam until it became clear that he was a failure and the CIA backed a coup. More famous is the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile and the countercoup that restored the Shah of Iran to power.

Three: Dr. Paul has promised to end foreign aid. Many people view this as being uncompassionate and selfish, but it’s not because foreign aid from the federal government goes to foreign governments and the dictators in control of those governments.

I’d wager that the country is poor because the dictator and his cronies are stealing everything from the people. The most egregious example is of the Ajaojuta steel mill in Nigeria, a project that began in 1979. After 29 years and $5 billion in aid, the mill has yet to produce a single bar of steel.

Four: The Patriot Act. The 21st century’s version of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams’ presidency, Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in places where there was neither rebellion nor invasion and Woodrow Wilson’s policies during the First World War. Ron Paul has sworn to repeal it if elected president. The beloved Barack Obama voted in favor of the unconstitutional law, as did John McCain and Hilary Clinton.

Five: Congressman Paul’s environmental policy is, in my view, the greenest that has ever been articulated. As a supporter of the free market, Dr. Paul believes in the absolute right to private property. What this means to the environment is that a factory can dump toxic waste into a river as much as they want – as long as they make arrangements with the people who own property that would be affected. If you don’t like the smog coming across your property you can sue the polluter. An organization like Riverkeepers would figuratively and literally clean up if Ron Paul was president.

A Ron Paul presidency would be the greatest triumph for freedom in this

country since Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800. This November, I implore you to not be blind to the machinating would-be despots fighting for power and vote for the one man who can restore freedom and democracy to our wayward republic.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].