It's worth a brief mention that no op-ed page or newspaper has been more ferociously hostile to Ron Paul than the Washington Post, cementing its evolution into the mouthpiece of the Washington establishment, rather than any independent counter to it. No columnist had anything good to say about Paul (there was a token outsider op-ed from Nick Gillespie), and many piled on with rhetoric of an extreme version. Michael Gerson wrote of Paul's Republican supporters that "they prefer their poison pill covered in glass and washed down with battery acid". Richard Cohen merrily played the Nazi card:
This is pretty much what used to be called isolationism, and it allowed Hitler to presume, quite correctly as it turned out, that America would not interfere with his plans to conquer Europe, Britain included.
Where, exactly is Hitler today, a fascist leader commanding a first-world economy with a massive military? Oh, yes, a tin-pot dictatorship of religious nutballs with a GDP lower than Norway's and missiles that cannot reach Bahrain. Marc Thiessen insists that Paul's "are not conservative positions. They are not libertarian positions. They are nutty positions." Jennifer Rubin in one of her milder attacks, argued:
Perhaps it is time for the Iowa’s governor, as a service to his party and the state, to issue an “anyone but Paul” endorsement. It might be the best thing he could do for his state’s continued political influence.
Every one of these columnists has a right to these opinions. My point would simply be that the Post has several cookie-cutter statist, neoconservative, pro-war, pro-torture columnists, but not a one who could be called a libertarian or someone who can get outside the conventional wisdom of the Village. And their response to a figure of genuinely fresh ideas is not to explore them, even when they are putting a candidate third in national polls, nor to engage them, but to declare them simply "out of bounds" or ignore them completely.
The Dish 