Justin Raimondo writes on Paul Sr's recent polling success

You can find the entire commentary here:

As I said in a recent issue of The American Conservative, however, I don’t think the prospects for a left-right alliance on the issue of war and peace are all that bright, to begin with because what used to be the left has essentially been absorbed into the Obama cult, and co-opted by power. In the end, all liberals really care about is getting their "fair share" of the spoils, for themselves and their supposed constituencies. So what if the price they have to pay is going along with mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan? We all have to die sometime.

I harp on Ron Paul for all sorts of reasons, but the one of most interest to my readers is the fact that he is by far the most successful antiwar politician in recent American history. Derided as being one of those dreaded "isolationists," and attacked even by some alleged "libertarians" precisely for that – and because he appeals to the common man – he not only insists on raising this issue, for him it is central to his analysis of what he calls the "Welfare-Warfare State," a phrase coined by the late Murray Rothbard. Dr. Paul’s diagnosis of a nation fast exhausting itself in an orgy of spending and militaristic adventurism has the stark ring of truth about it – an alarm bell ringing in the night.

When Paul and others first sounded that alarm, back in the early formative years of the libertarian movement, very few were heeding the call. We were looked on as eccentrics, and, for example, the libertarian enthusiasm for gold was viewed as indicative of our archaic perspective, put down as an ideological curiosity and nothing more than a "crackpot" notion and a bad investment. Today, of course, those libertarian doomsayers who said the crisis was coming have been vindicated – and all that gold they bought way back in the 1970s, and kept buying in spite of the disdain of more worldly investors, today adds up to quite a bundle. Which is one way to get around to saying that a great deal of Paul’s newfound political authority and credibility comes out of his having predicted the current economic downturn. Virtually every speech made in Congress, and wherever he appeared, was dotted with references to the coming collapse if we didn’t mend our ways. Well, we didn’t, and it’s here.

That’s one factor the learned Ben Smith, and the rest of the "experts" and media know-it-alls fail to take into consideration. What fuels the tea party phenomenon and the vast anger animating the American public at the moment is the series of bailouts: the banks, the auto industry, the government workers, the Afghan government of our erstwhile ally, Hamid Karzai, not to mention the Israelis, the nation of Iceland, and maybe even the Greeks, for all we know.

As ordinary people see their homes foreclosed, their jobs evaporate, and their savings disappear, the rich get richer – not because of capitalism, or even "socialism," as the tea partiers describe the Obama administration’s philosophy, but due to corporatism, as Ron Paul recently explained. Corporatism is, in essence, socialism for the rich, that is, for the benefit of certain big corporations over other big corporations, and a raft of would-be smaller competitors. That would seem to be a precise definition of what’s going on in the country today, one that fits nicely in with the left-right synthesis the Paul movement represents, and for which the country yearns. Paul sweeps the independents in the Rasmussen poll, with an astonishing 47-28. Add to this Paul’s appeal to what a recent Pew poll characterized as rising "isolationist" sentiment, and what you have is a new American majority based on the proposition that the US government should start minding its own business, both at home and abroad.