I've been calling Fox 'News' the Republican Television Network for awhile, but Rand Paul actually framed it far better in his little interview with Howie Kurtz. Kurtz, by the way, no longer tries to make a pretense of impartiality, as you'll see in this interview.

Senator Paul told Howie his appearances on Fox 'News' have been "extraordinarily helpful". Not only that, says Paul, "The emergence of Fox News has allowed there to be a conservative viewpoint."

His illustration for that claim is simple enough.

"When I was a kid, there were three networks, and they were all identical and they were all liberal. And now with Fox - and also with the Internet - there really is much more of a balance."

When he was a kid, those three networks actually reported facts, the things that are consistently missing from Roger Ailes' Republican News Channel, aka Fox "News". If they were perceived to be liberal, it's because facts have a liberal bias.

Conservative viewpoints require some factual distortion in order to make the consumers of said viewpoints feel as though they're victimized by their opponents, who they view as demon spawn from hell.

It's also necessary for said conservative viewpoint to voice full-throated support for war with some country, whether Iran, Iraq or elsewhere. That may prove to be a problem for Rand, but at least he's managed to finagle the Kentucky legislature into letting him run for two offices at once.

And to illustrate that, watch what Rand says (or doesn't say) about his appearance on Rachel Maddow's show, which he is apparently still very angry about. It's early in the clip.

The only thing Rand Paul is accurate about is that they have indeed managed to game the Internet with all of their echo chamber websites, designed to create memes, Google-bomb names, and spread misinformation.

We call that the "Fox Effect."

Just for nostalgia, here's Rand Paul on Rachel Maddow's show in 2010, talking about repealing the Civil Rights Act.