Remember Ron Paul? Congressman Ron Paul?

The long-term libertarian-like representative from Texas who's even older than McCain? The guy with a leased blimp who sought the Republican presidential nomination last year and came within something like 1,000 delegates of upsetting the Arizonan.

Paul lasted a lot longer than Romney, who had to write off some $40 million of his own dough.

And Paul's hundreds of thousands of dedicated supporters way-outraised that preacher Huckabee who's now all over Fox News, which, btw, is the network that barred Paul from its New Hampshire GOP debate because he had no chance. Although, to be fair and balanced, Paul had done better in Iowa than Giuliani or that D.A. Thompson guy, what's his name Frank or Fred. Thank goodness Fox protected its viewers from this Texan, who used to be an ob-gyn.

So Paul marched all the way to St. Paul, past that ex-New York mayor, who the mainstream media said was the certain GOP nominee until he wasn't; Giuliani made it only a few hours past Florida.

Here's how silly Ron Paul is: He set a budget for his campaign and lived within it. Flew commercial. Stayed at Super 8's. No motorcades.

In fact, he ended with no deficit, which is how he thinks the federal government should operate.

In point of fact, Paul ended his campaign with a surplus. Can you imagine anything so silly in this day and age?

Paul warned all during his campaign about a looming economic disaster if government just kept growing and growing and printing more money like Republicans and Democrats wanted. Many said he was loony. His noisy followers too. Today, just because the old geezer predicted correctly, Paul thinks someone will listen to him? Get real!

Paul was on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday, and he absolutely amazed the reporters by patiently explaining that we got into this national financial whirlpool by spending too much government money, and so the solution was probably not to spend even more government money. Ever heard anything so wacky?

You can listen for yourself on the video below. But in a nutshell, here's the craziness Paul peddles: "We should be cutting spending. We should be trying to live within our means and not just try to spend our way out of a recession that was brought upon us by too much spending and too much borrowing and too much printing-press money."

LOL!

Oh, and here's something else. Paul says the reason housing prices are falling is because there's too much housing on the market, something about supply exceeding demand. So, Paul reasons, instead of spending hundreds of billions of deficit dollars to build more houses, making the supply even larger, politicians should risk unpopularity, cut spending and taxes and let the market settle out.

And the startled reporters point out that would mean thousands could lose the homes they can't afford. And Paul said yes, something like 8%. But how much help has spending hundreds of billions been so far? So spending hundreds of billions more will work better?

And they thanked him for his time. Watch for yourself.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Associated Press