Not all wagers are created equal. There are good bets; there are bad bets. And then there are terrible, awful bets. If you put your chips on the money wheel, or the hard eight — those are sucker bets.

And as a public service, I'm here to warn you about the biggest sucker bet in the history of the world: Ron Paul is getting 6-1 odds to win the presidency. He's getting 4-1 odds to win the Republican nomination. That's the worst action ever.

Unless, of course, you're Ron Paul. In which case it's some very sweet action.

Seven months ago, Paul was a 200-1 long shot. As his campaign picked up steam, and the money poured in, the odds began to shift. By the end of May, they stood about 15-1; by August they were 8-1. As I write this, Sportsbook.com and other online bookmakers have Paul a 6-1 underdog to be the next president of the United States, just slightly worse chances than John McCain and Rudy Giuliani (5-1) and Barack Obama (7-2), ahead of Mitt Romney (8-1), and way ahead of Mike Huckabee (50-1).

It is, as the kids say, a Ron Paul revolution. And it is utter madness.

Where did this Ron Paul boomlet come from? The same place all weird ideas come from these days: the InterWeb. Paul has, by a giant margin, the most heavily trafficked Web site of any politician running for office this cycle. He has more MySpace connections than any of the Republican candidates. On YouTube, only Obama gets a wider viewership.

Recently, Paul raised $4.2 million in a single day from 37,000 donors. It was the biggest 24-hour haul made by any Republican so far. At the end of the third quarter, he sat in fourth place among Republicans in cash on hand. By the end of the next quarter, he could easily be third: He has raised more than $7 million since Oct. 1 and wants to get to $12 million before New Year's.

The importance of this war chest is that it means, as Paul told reporters, "We can buy unlimited TV in New Hampshire."

This may be significant. Paul has only a small national following. In the most recent Rasmussen poll, he clocked in at 6 percent. In Iowa, his support is low-grade, but in New Hampshire he's riding at 4 percent. He probably has enough critical mass to move and some room to grow. (Remember that Pat Buchanan finished second in New Hampshire in 1992 and first in 1996.) Fred Thompson is sitting at 7 percent there; Huckabee is at 10 percent. Both McCain and Giuliani are within shouting distance in the mid-teens. Anyone who finishes behind Paul in the Granite State probably will drop out the next morning. And he isn't going to finish last.

The fact that Paul is poised to play spoiler is less interesting than his ideology, which is less interesting than his base of support. But first things first.

Paul's basket of positions is large and, in its way, non-contradictory. He is a constitutional absolutist, the kind who thinks strict constructionists are squishes. As a result, he is antiwar. By which I mean virtually all wars: He was against Gulf War I, Kosovo, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and the current Iraq war. He voted for the liberation of Afghanistan but now seems to regret it. He favors a splendid isolationism, and the totality of his plan for Iraq, as he told the New York Times, is: "Just leave." Paul also would have America leave a host of international organizations, including NATO.

Paul voted against both the Patriot Act and the Financial Antiterrorism Act; he wants to put America back on the gold standard. He seeks to legalize drugs and to amend the Constitution to revoke the automatic grant of citizenship to people born on U.S. soil. It is not perfectly clear what his own opinion is on the origin of the 9/11 attacks, but when asked about the subject by a group of conspiracy theorists, he replied, "I never automatically trust anything the government does when they do an investigation."

He is, in short, the crank of many colors.

As such, he has attracted the support of a wide array of groups: from pro-legalization college potheads to the Grandpa Simpson types who long for the Bretton Woods days; from 9/11 Truth nuts to professional neo-con haters; from anti-immigrant isolationists to white supremacists. It's a big tent.

That doesn't automatically make him a nutter, but it combines uncomfortably with the fact that Paul is someone who won't take no for an answer. He first ran for Congress in 1974 and lost. He tried again two years later in a special election and won. Seven months later, in the regular election, he lost again. In 1978, he gave it yet another try, and this time got, and held, the Texas seat. Until he abandoned it to try for the Senate. He lost that election, too.

After that defeat, Paul took his act national, running for president as the Libertarian Party's nominee in 1988. Seven years later, he was at it again, going after his old House seat (much to the chagrin of the Republican Party). He won it, but kept a relatively low profile. Until recently.

So why is Paul taking off now? Because there aren't any other cranks running (although Dennis Kucinich is trying his best to look like one). And — perhaps you've noticed? — there are a lot of strange people out there.

They're rallying to Paul, and they're not going away. Come January, some Republican candidates may be wishing they would.

Jonathan V. Last is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.