I find this rather funny, as your editors have joined with the “mainstream” you profess to spurn, in claiming Ron Paul’s ideas to be “extreme.” His ideas are “extreme” because they do not fit within the two-inch political spectrum from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich.

We have not erected a cult of personality around him. It’s not his personality that is compelling. Americans such as me like Ron Paul because he is the only candidate willing to tell us what we need to hear, not the platitudes that people like to hear. He happens to be the only candidate that represents real change.

Both parties in essence advocate the same ideas; they differ only in degrees. Practically all of the Republican candidates, save Paul, are equally clueless on the economic causes of this depression, and supported disastrous government intervention; are against big government only when they are not in charge; are agreed on a policy of war first and diplomacy last; are agreed that we should maintain an empire to “make the world safe for democracy”; are agreeable to accepting an elected dictator who can extra-judicially order the killing of any individual – even an American citizen; profess support for the 10th Amendment, except when a state would do something they don’t like; don’t find problematic the notion that this supposedly “Christian nation” should use torture, doing “evil, that good may come”; and only want to increase government spending at a slower rate rather than actually shrink it.

If this newspaper wants to buck the establishment media, it should actually consider real alternative views of what the federal government’s role should be, rather than minute variations of the same status-quo philosophy.

Jarrod Murdock

North Augusta, S.C.