TAMPA, Fla. — By the time the balloons fall, and Willard Romney and his faithful zombie-eyed granny-starving companion are waving to the adoring throngs who, a mere eight months ago, thought Romney to be a RINO squish in magic underwear, nobody is going to remember what happened on Tuesday afternoon. Well, that's not true. Cindy Lake and Lori Steed are going to remember. Oh, my lord, are they going to remember.

"I literally have 5,000 e-mails in my in-box from people all over the country who didn't want to see 15 a, b, and c pass," said Lake, a delegate from Nevada. "This morning we got into the rules committee, and the chairman called the meeting to order, and Morton Blackwell's bus was detained, he was not in meeting. The chairman said, due to the weather, and because we have three days instead of four, we're going to limit discussion."

"Well, apparently, a tyrannical takeover of our party will happen," said Lori Steen, an Oklahoma delegate. "I don't understand why everybody else is standing and cheering. Either they're clueless about what they just did, or they're in favor of not having their voices heard anymore."

There was what passes for an uprising at a modern political convention on Tuesday afternoon here, long before the state of New Jersey put Willard Romney over the top to lose the whole "presumptive" thing. The immediate casus belli was something called Rule 12, which was passed by a voice vote that, to these ears, was a lot closer than the chair indicated. The delegates who are here in support of Ron Paul made up in volume what they (allegedly) lacked in numbers. The rule change got gavelled through and the Paul forces went up the wall.

There is one thing to remember about how this convention got itself put together. As much fun as we've had here on the blog, and throughout the land, with Crazy Uncle Liberty (!), the people supporting him got pretty well screwed this time around. They got screwed at the local level and at the state level and, on Tuesday, they got rogered good and proper by their national party. And, if we abide by the blog's Five-Minute Rule — that Ron Paul supporters stop making quite as much sense at the 5:00:01 mark — you eventually get to Cindy Lake and her opinion that "Morton Blackwell's bus was detained... we don't know by who." But, right up until then, it's quite clear that some of the people most invested in the Republican nominating process were completely hosed.

"In effect, they've said to us, you have no voice," Lake said. "The Tea Party has no voice, The Liberty Movement has no voice. None of the little constituencies in the Republican party have any voice any more. I can vote for Ron Paul, but we can't nominate Ron Paul."

Two things happened on Tuesday afternoon. There was a compromise on one rule that allows the Republican National Committee now to revoke the credentials of delegates who fail to follow the binding rules set down by their state committees. (This brings the authority of the national party into a function heretofore exercised by the state committees.) And there was the passage of Rule 12, the one that got John Sununu hollered at from the floor, which allows two-thirds of the RNC leadership, rather than the convention as whole, to change any party rule. "I really don't believe that most of the people who voted here today realize exactly how much of their own freedom they voted away," said Rob Bybee of Nevada, who was fielding the questions that went past Lake. "The committee can change anything midstream. We got smushed."

What happened on Tuesday fits comfortably into the narrative that the Paul people have been building all year. Because they actually do things like read local party rules, they were able to control local caucuses to the point that places like Oklahoma, had the Republicans held to their rules, wound up with a majority of their delegates committed to Paul. Steen was one of them. Then, she said, it went to the state level, and the process went haywire.

"We had a credentials report, and there were all kinds of discrepancies in the credentials report," she said. "There was never an official credentials report to the delegation. Basically, they shut the lights out on our delegation. There were older Republican people physically assaulting people. I was personally physically assaulted. I was punched in the back by a woman from Dewey County.

"We were in a large hotel ballroom and our delegation, which was the largest in the state, literally had the walls pulled out and the microphones turned off. They were shut off from the view of the chair, and yet the chair adjourned the meeting illegally because there was no way they could see a third of our delegation. We are required by our party rules to take a roll call vote. In Oklahoma, it's not one-man, one-vote. Each vote is weighted by county. The chair was taking, basically, a voice vote, and I don't care what kind of a mathemetician you are, you cannot mathematically tell how much a vote is weighted by a voice vote. We objected and they illegally adjourned the meeting."

This was all bound to happen. This is what always happens to people who live in a world of strict construction, whether that is a strict construction of something as important as the Constitution, or a strict construction of something as seemingly trivial as local party rules. They are always blindsided by compromise, struck dumb by the simple human impulse to power and how effective it can be when it is wielded by people who are not overly afflicted by conscience.

Ron Paul took a tour of the convention floor early this afternoon and he was greeted like the pope on parade. People hung over the railings to toss him things to sign. He wandered around looking half-stunned by his reception, a purple lei hanging around his neck, and looking half-stunned by the enthusiasm of his reception. He looked like someone who'd awoken into a dream, rather than the other way around.

PLUS: Why the Maine Delegates Walked Out and Why the Paulites Aren't Going Down Easy

FOLLOW MORE LIVE COVERAGE FROM TAMPA ALL WEEK LONG RIGHT HERE AND WITH @ESQPOLITICS ON TWITTER >>

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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