Look. Rand Paul is a libertarian. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. A socialist is pretty much the polar opposite of a libertarian. A libertarian is pretty much the polar opposite of a socialist. And there’s at least one major difference between the two, aside from ideology: libertarians are, by and large, not drooling idiots.
So good luck with that, Bernie.
…but I agree with Leon Wolf: if the below ad is what the Rand Paul campaign has been reduced to, then it is long since past time that the man retires from the Presidential race and concentrates on his Senate re-election. Rand can hope to continue to be exceptionally useful in the Senate. There’s no shame in him staying there, and giving people fits.
Politico: “The Kentucky GOP’s central committee voted Saturday to adopt a presidential caucus system next year, clearing the way Republican Sen. Rand Paul to run for president and reelection at the same time.” It’s costing Senator Rand Paul $500K to do this – he’s agreed to cover the costs of the Kentucky GOP running a caucus instead of a primary – but apparently the first-term Senator thinks that it’s worth it. Certainly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell does, too. Continue reading Sen. Rand Paul looks likely to be able to run for Senate and President next year.
Senator Rand Paul and I are not likely to exchange Christmas cards any time soon – after all, he’s a libertarian and I’m a neoconservative. But I’ll say this: I could watch him piss off the media all day. And even the parts of the media who agree that Rand Paul might have a point sometimes are, I think, still unaware about just how little the American people care when a politician pisses off a reporter.
Seriously, it won’t hurt Rand Paul with the voters if he treats reporters the way that Barack Obama treats reporters. Even if the reporters swear revenge. Possibly because of the reporters swearing revenge, actually.
Yeah, Dick Morris has come out and said, point-blank, that Rand Paul cannot win. Which means… Rand Paul really does have a chance, then. And I’m not saying anything that nobody else is: if Intrade was still in existence, contracts on a Paul win would be immediately hopping right now.
…Come, I will conceal nothing from you. I would have stood not on the order of my coming but gone at once, too.
Rand Paul: Whoa, Look At The Time. Yeah, I Have A Thing, So I Gotta Go. But Hey, Nice To Meet You. Oh And If You Want To Finish My Fries, Sure, They’re Yours.
Via @AppFlyer, not really news, just something a little amusing for the late morning.
Some will say this is cowardice. I’d say it’s excellent situational awareness. You see if you suddenly find your self at a table with Congressman Steve “illegal aliens are drug dealers with cantaloupe-calves” King and a young woman introduces herself as an illegal alien you want to be anywhere else in the known universe rather than serve as the backdrop for whatever comes next and is splashed across the internet.
Hell, I would have thrown down a smoke bomb, first. Or maybe set off an EMP pulse. Continue reading When it comes to Rand Paul’s skipping the DREAMER/Steve King discussion…
The problem is simple: both men are Senators in states where you cannot run for two federal positions at the same time. The answer is equally simple: neither should run for President in 2016. Rand Paul should stay in the Senate and be an awesomely cranky Senate Majority Leader*; and Marco Rubio should run for governor of Florida in 2018 and get ready for 2024.
There. Problems solved. That should have cost each Senator five thousand dollars apiece in consulting fees, but apparently those jobs are all locked up already.
Moe Lane
*Seriously, there’s all sorts of things that you can do to a federal bureaucracy from the top.
This is an interesting Maureen Dowd piece: there’s a good bit less teeth-gritting going on than I expected.
Senator Claire McCaskill told Andrea Mitchell that she found [Senator Rand] Paul’s comments [about Bill Clinton] “infuriating,” and that he was just “grasping,” trying to show he could be tough in a bid to win the presidential nomination.
But back when McCaskill, now on Team Clinton, was trying to crush Team Clinton and get Barack Obama elected, she said this about Bill: “He’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”
Paul brought that up with me, suggesting that if McCaskill were being honest and not partisan, she would still be worried about having her daughter around Bill and that maybe there’s a double standard for the famous.
Wait. This stuff is bad?
OK, I don’t normally fisk, but I gotta do this one. From The New Republic’s rather alarmed profiling of Senator Rand Paul:
In the Senate, Paul gained a reputation as an eccentric. Staffers often saw him wandering alone into the cafeteria, buying his own coffee, getting his own lunch—which, they noted, was not very senatorial.
That’s a damning indictment of the Senate, frankly.
Nor was his reputation for reading every page of every bill.
So’s that. Continue reading TNR… trying to make the case for Rand Paul in 2016.
…of the distinguished gentleman from Georgia:
I support killing bad guys with drones overseas. Hell, I’m okay with killing bad guys in the United States with drones if they are about to cause imminent harm. But the administration’s standard was far too nebulous. It is opposed by a majority of Americans. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and others who are okay with drone attacks on bad guys supported Rand Paul because Paul found the sliver of ground on which they could all be opposed to an Obama Administration policy.
– My colleague Erick Erickson, over at RedState. As most of you know, I self-identify as ‘neoconservative:’ and my major problem with Barack Obama’s foreign policy is that he’s trying to do what he thinks George W Bush would do under the same circumstances, only he’s not very competent even at that. But I loved watching that filibuster. It was utterly guilt-free; I’m aware of Rand Paul’s likely defense stances, but he managed to keep the debate framed in terms that I could accept without quibbling. And then he made the administration give way on a point.
That last point is important: because the last time I checked neither, say, John McCain and/or Lindsey Graham (who I don’t actually particularly dislike) have done as well lately.
Moe Lane
PS: I think that the time has come for Senator McCain to announce that this will be his last term in office.
