Most of the news I see everyday is either infuriating or depressing: the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, revolution in the streets of Egypt and not America, and anything that confirms that Pat Robertson still isn’t dead yet. However, every now and then I see something that gives me hope that America isn’t completely f***ed. The latest bit of information to inspire such optimism was Ron Paul winning the 2011 CPAC straw poll.

Perhaps it’s a sign that the new faction of Tea Party might be an asset to the mission of bringing the American government back into it’s constitutional limits, as opposed to just a bunch of pissed off rednecks waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, as was once widely believed. While every other speaker at CPAC played towards the small-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement (a position most did not hold in the aftermath of 9/11), Dr. Paul was merely reiterating the same basic principles he’s been preaching for some 35 years. In addition, unlike the other possible candidates, instead of delivering vague, short half-hearted slogans to the audience about balancing the budget and decreasing the size of the government, Dr. Paul clearly outlined the problems in the American political machine such as the Federal Reserve, foreign aid, and our military presence in other countries.

While Dr. Paul has held these dissident views for quite sometime, he became a sort of celebrity after his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in 2008 and the formation of the Tea Party.

What’s interesting about the poll results is that Dr. Paul won by a wide majority, especially over other candidates with a much more solid association to the Tea party movement such as Sarah Palin. In fact, Dr. Paul has no official ties with the Tea Party other than arriving to their conclusion far earlier.

But perhaps more interesting that the straw polls results was how the mainstream media decided to present it. Fox News spliced in booing from the 2010 CPAC Conference when Dr. Paul was on stage, they ran an article paying more attention to second placer Mitt Romney than Dr. Paul and featured Romneys picture, and a Fox opinion writer named Kevin McCollough, who is the definition of a statist scum****er, wrote a column titled “Disrespectful Libertarian Hijack CPAC Poll – and It’s Mission”. It get’s better. In the article, he tells us of third-placer Gary Johnson’s representing “immoral libertarianism that actually advocated for legalized pot and the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual unions” Those heathens!

Mr. McCullough alleges that the increased number of libertarians at CPAC in recent years has defiled his precious conservatism, scorning them for being disrespectful of war criminals, whined about the absence of evangelical f***wads and labels Libertarianism as “the worst form of political affiliation in the nation. Combining the desire of economic greed, with the amoral desire to promote any behavior regardless of it’s cost to our culture is a stark departure from the intent of the Founding Fathers.”

At first, I was outraged at how the media could take such a victory for freedom and paint it as insignificant and even illegitimate, however I later came to realize that they did this for a very simple reason: fear. He’d scared the bastards to the point they’d tripped over themselves trying to discredit him, and it was obvious to everyone.

To quote Dr. Paul himself, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies”, and this is merely the Evil Empire cracking down on him, but behind their lies we can see the truth clearly, and the truth is that freedom works, and that the people know that. When dissident ideas spread, those in power sweat, Perhaps Dr. Pauls vision in 2008 can be accomplished in 2012, perhaps not, however either way, the Revolution will continue. As long as people want to be free and are willing to fight for it, the REvoluton lives on.