Rand Paul

Here is Rand Paul’s rebuttal: “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money.” Then he went “hyck hyck hyck” and looked sort of smug. When the basic idea — sometimes spending a bit of money now saves a lot of money later! — was explained to him again, his response was to say something about the government being bad, and to suggest that if this insane magical spending-to-save thing is true, why not spend a ZILLION dollars feeding old people? (The cheapest option, I guess, would just be to not pay for old people to eat or go to the hospital at all, and to let them die in their homes and be buried in pauper’s graves, but it is maybe rude to suggest that that is Paul’s “plan.”)

Rand Paul is either presenting a misleadingly simplistic argument because he knows it will appeal to dumb conservatives (only a big-city liberal would think you could save money in the future by spending it wisely in the present!) or he’s actually as dumb as I have always said he is.

He’s obviously some combination of willfully obtuse and dimwitted, but how much of his dimwitted is calculated?

Like, for example, when he said he wanted to shut down the Department of Education because of “the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation,” he was obviously being an inflammatory bigot asshole, probably because he thinks his constituents are backward hicks who eat that kinda shit up. But does he also not actually know what the Department of Education does? Because they have no say in curricula!

And oh, also, when he said he would filibuster every budget that wasn’t balanced, was he just making stupid and unrealistic promises because, again, he has no respect for the intelligence of Kentucky voters, or did he actually not understand that senators can’t filibuster budgets?

The fact that he had no idea what happened in Harlan County is proof of his being incurious and ideologically sheltered, not necessarily dumb, but his criticism of the Americans With Disabilities Act showed that he doesn’t know what the Americans With Disabilities Act does.

I vote dumb. There’s obviously lots of pandering involved, but this guy really seems like Ron Paul’s Patrick Kennedy, you know?

The transcript (emphasis ThinkProgress’s):

PAUL: I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn’t be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

Hah, what? Rand Paul is against profiling based on race, and prefers… the criminalization of speech. Not just the act of of speaking, but of witnessing speech.

And if “radical political speeches by religious leaders” — of all religions! — and “speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government” are now cause for imprisonment or deportation, that means we must lock up all Tea Party rally attendees.

This has been another in installment in my ongoing series, “If I were a smart libertarian I’d be embarrassed to have Rand Paul represent my philosophy to the nation.”

So considering his history of smugly saying stupid things, no one should be surprised that Sen. Paul said this:

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
[...]
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

Offensive, insulting, infused with the self-pitying victimology of the very privileged, and so self-evidently dumb that a college freshman who just discovered Ayn Rand would be embarrassed to have said it. It’s a Rand Paul argument, all right! Why are you trying to enslave Rand Paul, by having the government offer him money to treat people? That is literally human bondage. You jackbooted “Medicare” thugs will get Doctor Paul’s phoropter from his cold, dead hands!

Has Rand Paul read the Constitution? Serious question! Because it bans slavery, yet it also says people shall “enjoy the right” “to have the Assistance of Counsel” in criminal prosecutions! Does Rand Paul know that we have been enslaving lawyers for 200 years?

The nice thing about Paul is that he makes many Randian arguments sound precisely as stupid as they are. If I were a non-stupid libertarian I would probably not get much joy from Paul’s success and prominence.

Quayle bombed. (His “caustic routine drew little more than an awkward silence from the large audience,” Politico CLICK wrote. That’s a pan at Politico CLICK.) He was creepy, stilted, mean, and unfunny. He basically confirmed, live on C-SPAN 3, that he is exactly who you thought he was.

Tea Party outsider Rand Paul also put on his monkey suit and delivered some moldy gags to the Washington lifers who are destroying America. His worst weird and uncomfortable jokes were about Aqua Buddha and Rachel Maddow. Second-generation anti-Washington politicians have horrible delivery.

All of these dinners are basically awful, of course, but rarely do quite so many people who deeply detest Washington, Beltway cocktail parties, and the media attend them.