What to make of Ron Paul, the internet's poster boy for the presidency?

The Texas Republican, whose campaign traction seems confined almost entirely to the internet, is lagging after Iowa and New Hampshire. While he's no threat to win the GOP nomination, let alone the White House, the phenomenon of his online popularity bears scrutiny. For some of us who look more than 20 feet beyond our noses, it’s troubling.

If the internet has the power to legitimize the national candidacy of someone as extreme as Ron Paul, then maybe it should be regulated. (Kidding. Just kidding.)

It's not hard to understand Paul's appeal to the internet cognoscenti. He's a libertarian (to use the word in its simplest form), and if any political philosophy can be said to broadly appeal to inveterate online devotees, that's the one. And he brings impeccable libertarian credentials to the table, which manifest themselves in some very beguiling ways.

To wit:

He opposed the Patriot Act, breaking ranks with his own party to do so.

He voted against the imposition of a national ID card.

He's on record opposing the National Security Agency's domestic-spying program.

He favors lifting the embargo against Cuba. (I threw that one in for me, not you.)

This is catnip for many of you, I know. For me, too, actually. (Politics does make strange bedfellows, eh, comrades?)

He almost sounds rational. But he's not.

Like all absolutists – and make no mistake, libertarianism is absolutism as surely as atheism is faith – Paul is ill suited for this particular job. He's running for president of the United States, remember, not for a seat in some gerrymandered Texas congressional district. If elected, he would be leading the most powerful nation on earth, one whose every action has repercussions in every corner of the world.

We’ve already seen what happens when that trust is placed in the hands of the incompetent.

You can't be a good president in the 21st century when your chief concerns are the sovereignty of the American taxpayer and his right to bear arms. It’s too insular. Isolationism is no longer an option, and hasn't been for years. The world is too small and you can thank, or blame, technology for that reality. The stakes are far too high, as we've learned since Sept. 11, 2001, to act like we can do anything we damned well please anytime we damned well feel like it.

And this guy wants to pull us out of the United Nations. Terrific. The United States as rogue elephant. What a splendid idea.

Applaud Paul for championing your privacy rights if you will, but consider some of his other views, well documented, before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Speaking of babies, his libertarian defense of individual rights doesn't extend to women, apparently. Paul, an obstetrician in another life, opposes abortion. More specifically, he supports a state’s right to ban abortion. In other words, he doesn’t want Washington telling you that you can’t have an abortion, but if Montgomery, Austin, Salem or Richmond say you can’t, that’s OK.

He also equivocates on stem cell research, supporting it "generically" but again fobbing it off as a states-rights issue (like the old Confederacy, states rights is a major plank in the Paul platform). His chief concern isn't so much the morality of the research as who pays for it.

That's a new one on me: turning the stem cell debate into a taxpayer-rights issue.

But there’s more.

Domestically, a Paul administration would be so extreme in the defense of individual property rights as to make the Reagan years look like socialism. Paul says the federal government has helped damage the environment by “facilitating polluters, subsidizing logging in the national forests and instituting one-size-fits-all approaches that too often discriminate against those they are intended to help.”

He’s right in the sense that the Bush environmental record is abysmal, but Paul’s solution – let the private landowner protect his own land – is naiveté bordering on sheer lunacy. If Chauncey Moneybags owns 40,000 acres up near the Idaho-Montana border and decides to cash in by letting the timber boys do a little clear-cutting, who’s going to stop him? Paul says Chauncey can do whatever he wants to with his land. How is that helping the natural environment? (I’m assuming here that’s the environment Paul refers to.)

There are 300 million of us now, not 30 million, and we can’t all go running around unsupervised. This is where libertarian ideals get a little unwieldy. Besides, we’re not all John Waynes, saddled up and gazing with flinty eyes across the prairie. Some of us can barely cope. Sometimes, Ron, them dad-gum polecats in Washington jest have to step in and take charge. Dang it all.

And the foreign policy of a Paul administration? Replace the eagle with an ostrich and you'll have some idea.

Paul says he’s for free trade and he wants “to be friends,” but rejects the idea of the United States being part of any convention that subjects us to international law or restraint. He likens the United Nations to a modern-day Simon Legree – that's my hyperbole, not his – straddling Lady Liberty with a bullwhip and coldly, gleefully, stripping her bare.

The U.N. has been the bogeyman for American conservatives since the end of World War II because of its internationalist mandate. The right has never accepted that a U.N. vote contrary to the wishes of the United States does not translate to anti-Americanism. If there is anti-American sentiment along the East River these days, it's because we're swaggering around like the high school bully, and we've pissed a lot of people off.

As for military matters, Paul’s objection to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not that we ignored world opinion and attacked unilaterally, but that we violated the Washingtonian-Jeffersonian doctrine of “avoiding foreign entanglements.”

Iraq was deliberate aggression, a crime, but here’s a news bulletin just in for strict constitutionalists like Paul: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been dead for two centuries. Our world is just ever so slightly different from the one they knew. Realities have changed. If Virginia Sen. Tom Jefferson were roaming the halls of Congress today, he'd probably be a Democrat. Hell, he might not even own any slaves.

But this is the consciousness that Ron Paul would bring to the arena of international relations, the consciousness of 1796. The modern world is all about interaction, interdependence and active engagement, not isolationism. Sorry, Ron. I miss candlelight and hoop skirts, too, but you can’t go back.

Anyway, those two big oceans that used to insulate us from all that foreign chicanery have shrunk to the size of Walden Pond. Half my e-mail comes from “out there,” where people talk funny. We drink French wine, drive German and Japanese cars, and talk to our service reps in Bangalore, India. The guys making shepherd’s pie at the Irish pub down the street are from Central America, and all the meter maids in this town are Chinese.

Avoid foreign entanglements? Who’s kidding whom here? If we avoid foreign entanglements what do we plan on doing for an economy? Who are we going to offshore all our jobs to?

I’ve been called a utopian and a fool and worse for my own humanistic philosophy, which, like libertarianism, preaches the value of a single human being (but in the the more rational context of one being part of the whole). Fine. I’m a fool. But when push comes to shove, I’d rather be my kind of fool than yours.

May the best candidate win. Oh, wait. I don’t have one.

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.