Listen my children, I’ll tell you all
of the midnight nap taken by Ron Paul,
on the fourth of August in 2007
well before the time of eleven
in a hotel room not far from the mall.
He said in his speech, “If liberty falls
in Washington D.C. tonight
I won’t be there to heed the call,
but phone my office and we’ll talk all right,
press one to leave a message, two to speak to an aide
and I, in Iowa, will be laid,
ready to sleep but not to vote
or defend liberty from spies who dote
on Alberto Gonzales and the law I’ll quote.”
“On the ‘oral instructions’ that Gonzales makes
and compulsory orders a citizen takes
he will listen in on the telephone line
that could be yours and might even be mine.
No one will check or certify
that the spying is just or is based on a lie
or is made where they say and can justify.
Alas, I cannot make the vote to defend.
I have a fundraiser to attend.”
More important to campaign
for personal power there was to gain
than the duty which Ron Paul had sworn
to the Constitution the new law had torn.
He would speak to crowds about liberty,
but not come to its aid in the halls of D.C.,
where he was registered absentee.
And so they expanded Gonzales’s power
to spy on you at that dark hour.
Then he said “Good-night!”, and with muffled ears,
a TV movie and two lite beers
Ron Paul closed his eyes to the spies that raced
across the countryside as we faced
an end to the freedom obtained before
by Paul Revere and his friends of yore
with midnight rides and the loss of war,
and the bulk of his resting head was magnified
by lengthening shadows in the room where he lied.
So through the night slept Ron Paul here,
while through every blog went a cry of alarm
to every American city and farm –
a cry of defiance and of fear
of a voice in the darkness, a knock at the door
a tap on the phone or a bug in the floor,
for borne on the night wind away from the past
carrying our freedom away at last,
in the hour of darkness and peril and need,
no one will waken and listen to hear
the snores we were given in absence of deed
from the napping Ron Paul who would never appear.
