The Tea Party hero, Rand Paul, had a very unstable couple of days. On Wednesday 'Baby' Paul flamed out quicker than a defective Roman candle with Rachel Maddow. His performance was so utterly enlightening about his beliefs -- and thus truly terrifying. His advisers burned the midnight oil to figure out how far he would run back what he really believes so that he could appear as somewhat normal.
His weak ass flip flop on Civil Rights before the sun came up on Thursday shows you how America views Paul's ideology. His defense is that we're all just conflators.
Evil liberals only wanted to bring up a case that he was too young to remember. Heck, I'm not even bring up his wretched 2002 letter to the Bowling Green Daily News. Things looked bleak so he needed a friend. Hello, Laura Ingraham. He told her that it was a poor political decision to go on Maddow's show because she's a conflater too and he won't be visiting her show for a while.
Rand Paul: You're right. And it was a poor political decision. Probably won't be happening any time in the near future. Yeah, because they conflate things and want to say ...
He was exposed to America for his 'Only Open for Big Business Club' principles that were passed down to him by Poppa Paul. And I'm no fan of those beliefs. Show me a liberal and I'll show you someone who really does care about civil liberties.
Michael Tomasky lets it all hang out in his post about Poppa Paul and Baby Paul even before this flameout occurred: Intellectual consistency can be overrated. Read the whole article because it's very funny.
When we write about libertarianism, most liberals feel compelled to say something like, you know, I disagree with that viewpoint, but I respect that it's principled and intellectually consistent.
I say balderdookey. Libertarianism is kookoo. There can be no such thing as a basically stateless society (except for national defense and barest administration of law, I think are the exceptions they typically allow for). It's just ridiculous. Civil society would collapse without the state.
I've written this before, a few months ago. Conservatives, and libertarians, seem to think that we have regulations in this society because we have a bunch of underemployed pencil pushers sitting around dreaming up ways to make small business people's lives miserable.
It's ridiculous. We have regulations because throughout history people in various pursuits did really sleazy and unethical things. They swindled investors, they dumped toxins into bodies of water, they made children work long hours for slave wages. Et cetera. And so laws were passed and regulations were written.
And unfortunately such is man's endless capacity for sleaze and unethicality that this process will never end: as technology presents new ways to be sleazy, we'll always need to invent new ways to prevent sleaze from happening.
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We all support a few libertarian-ish principles; we all agree that the state should have some limits. For example, I think it's perfectly fine for the state to make fast-food joints post nutrition information. But I would oppose the state having the right to ban the Quarter Pounder. So we all get that kind of thing.But big-L Libertarianism is vapid. I hope in the next few months it is properly exposed as such.
Baby Paul's staff will do everything they can to cover up his beliefs as much of it as he can and then to Luntzify them. Grab the popcorn.
