Fawke You, Washington!

(The title is from a comment by a freeper.)

Congressman Ron Paul, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, broke GOP online fund raising records on Guy Fawkes Day, by raising about $4.2 million.

Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament, but today he is given a different meaning; he is taken as a reminder

It is not the People who should fear the Government, but rather the Government which should fear the People.

Ron Paul is an old-style conservative, anti-war, anti-interventionism, for limited constitutional government and for fiscal responsibility, contra the neo-cons. He also has some antediluvian positions.

The Republican establishment would like Ron Paul to go away. From the left, Glenn Greenwald opines on the Ron Paul phenomenon:

The Paul campaign is now a bona fide phenomenon of real significance, and it is difficult to see this as anything other than a very positive development.

There are, relatively speaking, very few people who agree with most of Paul's policy positions. In fact, a large portion of Americans -- perhaps most -- will find something in his litany of beliefs with which they not only disagree, but vehemently so. Paul has a coherent political world-view and states his positions clearly and unapologetically, without hedges, and that approach naturally ensures greater disagreement than the form of please-everyone obfuscation which drives most candidates.......

.....So there is at least something in Paul's worldview for most people to strongly dislike, even hate, if they are so inclined. Yet that apparent political liability is really what accounts for the passion his campaign is generating: it is a campaign that defies and despises conventional and deeply entrenched Beltway assumptions about our political discourse and about what kind of country this is supposed to be.

While Barack Obama toys with the rhetoric of challenging conventional wisdom, Paul's campaign -- for better or worse -- actually does so, and does so in an extremely serious, thoughtful and coherent way. And there are a lot of people who, more than any specific policy positions, are hungry for a political movement which operates outside of our rotted political establishment and which fearlessly rejects its pieties, even if they disagree with some or even many of its particulars.

and

Perhaps most importantly, Paul is the only serious candidate aggressively challenging America's addiction to ruling the world through superior military force and acting as an empire -- not by contesting specific policies (such as the Iraq War) but by calling into question the unexamined root premises of these policies, the ideology that is defining our role in the world.