It's true that many of Paul's supporters are full of shit. When such esteemed civil liberties advocates as Michele Bachmann ("[Obama] is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA") start pretending to give a shit about drones, you know what a put-up job it is.
And Rand Paul is a nut -- not only wrong on the Civil Rights Act but sneaky about it, a Benghazi conspiracy theorist, etc. And he's only a civil libertarian in the uncivil libertarian sense, by which I mean highly selective:
....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.The new Tom Paine ovah heah. If he ever gets close to high office you can expect him to talk more like this than like Glenn Greenwald, guaranteed.
Still, like I said in an earlier consideration of this phenomenon, wrong is wrong and there's no reason for me to pretend it isn't for partisan advantage. I understand Obama has to -- he's got to deal with the traditional vulnerability of Democrats to charges of being, in the hoary old phrase, weak on defense. And hoary as it is, the charge still has power -- that's what Benghazi-mania is all about: wingnuts holding desperately onto an ancient equity.
But Obama's a politician; that's his lookout, not mine. And while I think he's better than the regular run of postwar U.S. Presidents, "having his back" does not for me extend to countenancing the assassination of U.S. citizens. So I endorse the current news-cycle-grabbing story, and look forward to hauling out the scrapbook when Presidential candidate Paul endorses the invasion of Iran.
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