Rand Paul is great at lifting other people's words and appropriating them as his own. Like this:
That looks a lot like this, from President Obama's 2012 interview with 60 Minutes:
"There's a broader lesson to be learned here, and, you know, Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later," Obama said in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes.
Let's give Baby Paul the benefit of the doubt and say the phrase "shoot first and aim later" is a proverb that anyone could use without being accused of plagiarism. The twisted and cynical use of it in his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal is actually worse than his misappropriation of the phrase.
Rand Paul uses that as an accusation against the President, ignoring exactly what Obama said in June of this year. Maybe Baby Paul thinks people don't have a memory, but the Internet damn sure does.
In September President Obama and many in Washington were eager for a U.S. intervention in Syria to assist the rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad's government. Arguing against military strikes, I wrote that "Bashar Assad is clearly not an American ally. But does his ouster encourage stability in the Middle East, or would his ouster actually encourage instability?"
Of course, we know Obama wasn't at all eager for a US intervention in Syria at all, but they were eager to pressure Assad into giving up his chemical weapons, and the strategy largely succeeded. It was yet another example of Obama's core belief that we should not shoot first and aim later.
Last fall, as President Obama weighed airstrikes against Syria, deliberations followed a clear pattern: The president solicited scores of options, planners returned with possibilities, and, according to people involved, Obama would reply with the same question: And then what?
Over the last several days, with Obama mulling involvement in another Middle East conflict, this time in Iraq, that dynamic has held.
The result is a policy that so far has put on hold calls from the Iraqi government for U.S. airstrikes against Sunni Islamic militants who have seized territory north and west of Baghdad. Instead, aides say Obama is waiting for evidence that the Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shiites, is willing to reach political reconciliation with Sunni groups.
This was the headline in the print version of that article, via Kevin Drum:
In essence, Rand Paul is endorsing Obama's foreign policy while pretending he's not. That's some awesome multi-dimensional chess there, Baby Paul. Good luck with that.
