The Battle for Iowa

Inundated as we've been over the past year with news about whichever Republican candidate happened to be the Tea Party's flavor of the month, it may come as a surprise to casual observers of politics that nothing... nothing has actually mattered in the development of the Presidential campaign until tonight. The Iowa Caucuses tonight are the first actual contest with anything of value at stake in the road to the White House. My pick (if you couldn't guess from the attention I gave him yesterday) is that Ron Paul pulls the upset- something that has the brass in the Republican Party terrified. If Paul was the GOP nominee (which the men behind the curtain in the Republican Party will make sure won't ever happen), all of the corporations and billionaires that bankroll the GOP would have to admit publicly the large extent to which they've just been playing lip-service to libertarianism (and social conservatism, at the other end of GOP radicalism) all these years, when they would inevitably end up supporting Barack Obama over the radical Dr. Paul. The corporate oligarchs in this country still control the Republican Party- don't let the Tea Party fool you. If you've watched Fox News lately, it's blatantly obvious that they've done everything they can to prevent a Paul victory tonight. If he does end up pulling out a victory anyway- the likelihood of which rests on the unbelievable enthusiasm of his supporters- just how little power the inmates in the Republican asylum actually have will become obvious over the coming days as the knives really start to come out.