He's an idiot. They are worse.
In most polite company these days, racists know they can't say what they really think, and so they couch it in code words. Idiots have no such compunctions.
Rand Paul is a special kind of idiot. He's a Libertarian. I should have some sympathy for him because I was a Libertarian.
When I was 20.
Then I met some other Libertarians. These idiots are terrifying. Anyone who does even a tiny amount of maturing has to get away from these stunted adolescents as fast as they can. For example, Dennis Miller considers himself a Libertarian. He was a Ross Perot supporter in 1992 when he was nearly 40.
I had an excuse in 1976. I was a snot-nosed kid. Miller does not have that defense. He's just an idiot.
Rand Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the standard propertarian party line. Propertarians are a particularly dull-witted strain of the Libertarian breed. If two people's rights are in conflict, whoever owns more property wins. If some business owner wants to discriminate against me because I'm white or I'm old or I don't attend the right church, the government has no right to interfere according to the propertarian point of view. My money is no good in their store and I can be turned down for a job for which I'm qualified or fired from that same job.
Here's the thing about most propertarians. Most of them think that discrimination is something that happens to other people. More freedom and less government is always the answer. Paul, idiot that he is, is now saying that Obama sounds "un-American" for attacking British Petroleum, the perpetrators of one of the worst environmental disasters of all time that is still an ongoing situation.
Let's review this, shall we? Obama, an American president elected overwhelmingly by the American people is "un-American" for asking for responsibility from a foreign owned corporation legally liable for an environmental nightmare that will disproportionately affect the livelihoods and property of Americans.
As I said. Idiot.
Some people are comparing Rand Paul with Sarah Palin. It's not completely fair. I've heard Rand Paul actually complete a sentence. He not only got through college, he's an ophthalmologist. His problem is that he has steeped in the scum-filled Libertarian gene pool for so long, he doesn't know reality from the weird concoction of paranoid fantasies and unworkable solutions these people openly espouse.
In 2008, Paul was campaigning for his father in Montana, and he spoke of the feared NAFTA superhighway and the "Amero" currency as though they were real. This is what happens when you live in a bubble and everyone you talk to is just as crazy and stupid as you are.
He showed some guts going on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Guts, but not much brains, as one might expect from an idiot. His comments on civil rights were front page news and Maddow, who is not an idiot, tore him to shreds in a fair and balanced way. He is now backpedaling fast enough to win an Olympic medal. He has canceled an appearance this Sunday on Meet The Press, claiming exhaustion. He is the third such cancellation in the show's sixty three(!) year history. The other people who flaked were Louis Farrakhan and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a.k.a. Bandar Bush because of his close ties to the Bush crime family.
Being an idiot does not disqualify a person from elected office. Rand Paul is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Jim Bunning, who has some strong idiot tendencies himself. But Paul has a long campaign ahead of him and a serious lack of experience at this level, and though he currently has a very big lead, his best strategy may be running out the clock.
Sadly for Dr. Paul, one of the main weaknesses of idiots is that they never use the best strategy.
