Ron Paul emerged from last week's GOP debate as completely victorious according to every available benchmark and yet there is still a deliberate ploy to push the Texas Congressman to the sidelines on behalf of a terrified corporate media.

Every single major online poll shows conclusively that Ron Paul won the debate by a mammoth margin, trouncing the bought and paid-for shill Neo-Con candidates that the establishment press are sworn to uphold.

After just over 18,000 votes, the ABC News poll shows Ron Paul with 15,568 compared with nearest rival Mitt Romney who is on a paltry 245. After initially scrubbing Paul from the poll altogether, ABC were forced to add his name after a deluge of furious calls and e mails.
Ron Paul led MSNBC's poll right from the start and before it had even been widely circulated. ABC News claims that activist voting and multiple voting by individuals artificially inflated Paul's numbers, but both claims are demonstrably false. Keith Olbermann reported that Paul was ahead before the link was spread around message boards and blogs and to vote multiple times is impossible - the poll only allows one vote per IP address.
At time of press, Paul currently has 40% approval and 25% disapproval, compared with 43% disapproval and only 22% approval for Giuliani.
Capital News, an arm of CSPAN, had Paul leading his nearest rival Mitt Romney by 60% shortly before voting closed. Rudy Giuliani garnered just 6% of the vote.
Yahoo! News is still censoring Ron Paul by not including him in the list of candidates on their 2008 presidential coverage page, despite the fact that he is wildly popular and has trounced every other Republican candidate in ever online poll.
After receiving a flood of angry complaints, Yahoo promised to review the situation, but 24 hours later their page is still absent any mention of Ron Paul.
This whole fiasco underscores the reality that the President of the United States is not elected by the popular will of the people, but instead is selected from a highly restricted gaggle of pre-approved establishment lackeys.
The corporate media offer the excuse that Ron Paul is not a mainstream candidate and has little chance of winning, therefore their decision to afford him little coverage is justified. But this is a chicken and egg scenario - if the media routinely ignore so-called marginal candidates then they are never going to attain the exposure of a Giuliani or a Romney, thus the media bias becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Ron Paul was afforded equal media coverage at every step of the way before the Republican nomination, and if America was still a free country with a democratic process that actually worked, then Ron Paul would be a shoe-in for the Oval Office.
But the fact remains, as is painfully underscored by the media's treatment of Ron Paul, that America is a banana republic where the president is not elected by popular will but selected by the corporate and military-industrial kingpins that for whom, upon inauguration, he becomes the puppet.