Paul Supporters Robbed at County Convention in GA Win Some Justice Against Establishment GOP

The mainstream media doesn’t much seem to be noticing as they chew their cud over and over about Romney Bain this and Obama Polls that, in endlessly looped (non-)”news” cycles, but things are looking pretty good for supporters of Ron Paul these days.

At least in as the Paul folks seem to be doing one helluva job of deliberately taking over their party from the inside through a seemingly very smart and certainly persistent and definitely well-organized strategy of taking over local district, county and state party conventions (and even party executive positions), all while seeing to it that Paul delegates get nominated to the Republican National Convention in state after state in the bargain.

What will come of all of those delegates once we get to Tampa remains to be seen. But make no mistake, they will be there and in force, and likely not shy about exercising the same strong (small “d”) democratic voice that got them there in the first place. Whether the corporate media has figured out that all of this is newsworthy yet is a different matter. (My bet is that it is.)

But while the persistence of the Ronulans may be paying off with both short and long term political dividends, the democratic process they are participating in itself is also seeing a number of victories, as evidenced by at least one comeuppance to GOP establishment types in the state of Georgia, where we now have a happy-ish ending to a story we reported on earlier this year.

The latest good news resulted in one of the players offering a remark we don’t often hear from inside the Republican Party — at least not by folks who mean it: “This decision re-affirms the party’s commitment to fair, open and honest elections”…

Power Paulitics

In a recent blog item, senior Paul strategist Doug Wead detailed many of the outrages and dirty pool that Paul supporters have been up against while taking on the GOP establishment in state after state. Nonetheless, they seem to be winning a lot of delegates and a number of powerful organizational and executive spots at the local district, county and state GOP level to boot.

“The delegate strategy is working,” wrote Wead. “That is the way we will impact the platform in Tampa. That is the way we will begin the process of change.”

Last night, TPM reported that a number of high-ranking officials in the Nevada GOP have stepped aside in the wake of Paul supporters having “dominated a March county convention to take 13 of 14 of executive board spots and performed similarly at the state convention, securing 22 national delegates to Romney’s three.”

The news suggests the establishment is worried, and they probably should be. The Paul supporters in Nevada, for example, recently “passed a resolution calling for RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to resign” and a “shadow state party” there has been created in response by the former establishment out of fear that the Paul folks will “derail Romney’s presidential campaign with ongoing efforts to hand the nomination to Paul,” according to TPM. They report there are now growing concerns “of an ugly feud spilling out at the national convention, where Paul supporters are expected to have a large and visible presence thanks to similar state convention takeovers around the country.”

What these relentless folks are doing — and the nightmares they may be causing for establishment GOP types — is otherwise known as “democracy”. Some of the GOP muckety-mucks who have tried to stamp out how democracy is supposed to work inside the party over the past several months may wanna look up the word before they find themselves entirely on the outside looking in.

Democratic Republicans

In mid-March, we reported on some of the early — and ugly — pushback that Paul supporters were initially receiving when showing up to exercise their democratic rights at a number of GOP county caucuses and conventions. In many cases, they were shut out of the process by Republican Party establishment insiders using virtually any means available to shut them down, as seen in some extraordinary moments caught on video tape.

In St. Charles County, MO for example, as we reported at the time, police were called in as pandemonium broke out, and arrests were made of peaceful Paul supporters. The caucus there was shut down by the establishment entirely before any votes were taken at all for the slate of delegates who were to go on to the state and then national conventions.

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