RUSH: This piece from the Washington Examiner is written by Timothy P. Carney, senior political columnist. What I was gonna explain to you is that Macintosh, the Mac OS X Lion has in its Safari Web browser a feature in the website address bar called Reader. You can click on the word Reader and nothing but the text of the story appears. No ads, no nothing. In fact, the website link doesn’t print and sometimes the author’s name doesn’t print, and if you don’t make a note of it when you print it out then you have no idea if you don’t remember what it is. Thankfully, at the end of the piece it says here Timothy Carney, the Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at… So that’s how I know who wrote this thing.

Now, this is a guy sympathetic to Ron Paul. He says in the second paragraph of his piece, “Disclosure: Paul wrote the foreword to my 2009 book.” Let’s see if the name of the book is mentioned here at the tail end of the piece. No. At any rate, what this is about, this story is basically a piece sympathetic to Ron Paul, how unfortunate it’s gonna be if Ron Paul wins the Hawkeye Cauci, how the mean-spirited extremist Republicans are gonna come down on this guy and try to wipe him out. “If Paul wins, how will the media and the GOP react? Much of the media will ignore him. Some in the Republican establishment and the conservative media will panic. Others will calmly move to crush him, with the full cooperation of the liberal mainstream media.”

I beg to differ. The liberal mainstream media will try to build Ron Paul up. “For a historical analogy, study the aftermath of Pat Buchanan’s 1996 victory in the New Hampshire primary. ‘It was awful,’ Buchanan told me this week when I asked him about his few days as the nominal GOP front-runner. ‘They come down on you with both feet.’
The GOP establishment that week rallied to squash Buchanan. Just after New Hampshire, Gingrich’s hand-picked group of GOP leaders, known as the Speaker’s Advisory Group, met with one thing on their minds, according to a contemporaneous Newsweek report: ‘How to deal with Buchanan.'”

So Mr. Carney, I’m assuming, since he discloses that Ron Paul wrote the forward to his book in 2009, is a Ron Paul acolyte and is very much concerned Paul’s gonna win this thing and then the Republicans are gonna come down on him and destroy him and so forth. And of course, folks, never count on the Republican Party to actually think about the consequences before something happens. They just react after it happens. They’re constantly defending things. They are never moving things forward. Constantly playing defense. And this would not even be happening if the Republican Party weren’t scared to death of nominating a real conservative. If the Republican Party weren’t so afraid of conservatism and having a conservative nominee, Ron Paul wouldn’t be anywhere near winning the Hawkeye Cauci. It’s just that simple.

But because the Republican Party insists on insider moderates or at least gives the impression that’s who they support, then it opens the door for all kinds of people to make headway because the Republican primary base is not interested in who the establishment is interested in. It’s just that simple. I’ll tell you something I’ve been saying here for the last couple, three weeks, maybe even longer than that, that Mitt Romney can’t get higher than 30% anywhere. Other than New Hampshire, he gets 35. But in truth no other Republican does, either. When you get right down to it, no other Republican is, either. Now, the reason for that is primarily this. The Republican establishment is trying to split the conservative vote among all the other conservative candidates, the Gingriches, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, I don’t mean to leave anybody out here, but they’re dividing that vote in the hopes of securing the nomination for Romney.

The problem is that the Republican primary voter does not want a moderate. They don’t want somebody they perceive as being a moderate. The Republicans might say, “Hey, look, no, no, no, we’re trying to tell you, Mitt’s a strong conservative, he’s the strongest conservative we got.” Well, the Republican primary voters don’t believe that when they’re told that. So they’re divvying up their votes elsewhere, and that is allowing a creep on the part of Ron Paul. Ron Paul foreign policy is out there, along with the conspiracy theories and everything else, it is out there, and it’s guaranteed defeat. It’s guaranteed defeat. Republicans will take the gloves off if Ron Paul wins. None of this needs to be happening. But the Republican Party is insistent governing against the will of its own voters, at least in the primary. That’s how it appears to me.