The always awesome Paul Krugman has a great column in today’s New York Times that sums up the problem the U.S. Republican Party is having finding a presidential candidate. In short, the party’s ideas are so crazy they have a choice between honest candidates who are nuts or sane candidates who are liars.

Here’s Krugman:

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!). And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.

It’s a terrific read.

But what about Ron Paul, say people who think he’s great? He’s not crazy AND he seems to stick by his statements. Well, possibly (or not). The problem with Ron Paul is that his ideas screw everybody but the billionaires. Here’s an excerpt from a recent column on Salon:

The guts of Paul’s grand scheme, where its rubber hits the road, is in the all-important theme of cutting programs that benefit the poor and middle class. Despite all its window-dressing and spin, the heart of every libertarian plan for this country is a kind of mammoth subtraction: making deep cuts in programs benefiting millions of Americans, out of a belief that such programs are morally wrong. Restoring America is a moral statement, an enshrinement of the Randian belief that aid to one facet of the population (the poor) is really “looting” of resources from other facets of the population (the wealthy) … Ayn Rand believed that there is no such thing as a “public,” and that the public was a collection of individuals, each having no obligation to the other.  So when you read through this budget, and see the deep cuts in food stamps and child nutrition, what you are seeing is an expression of a philosophy that is at odds with the Judeo-Christian system of morality embraced by most Americans.

The more you know! And now please enjoy this video of Ron Paul’s fake eyebrow falling off.