Back on March 27th, I said the following about the Tea Party: "I see exactly the same polls that you folks do, and I know just how dire things look for the Democrats this fall. But I also know that campaigns matter much more than they actually should. People like Charlie Rangel should be fitted for a prison cell, but I know for a fact that the GOP are going to nominate a boatload of Tea Party shitheads who are going to run around the country screaming impossibly dumb things about the Antichrist."As you might have noticed, I'm not especially good at making friends. However, neither is the newly-minted Republican nominee for the U.S Senate Seat in Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul.
Dr. Paul, like his father, Texas representative and 2008 presidential candidate, Ron Paul, has a long history of saying things with just enough truth in them to make them politically toxic. You cannot long tell Americans that they can't expect to keep living as they did in 1955 and survive for very long in politics. Telling voters that their free ride is over is the surest way to end a political career in any democracy, as Greece's politicians are currently finding out.
On the other hand, the Paul family has views on the Federal Reserve and the gold standard that are nothing short of certifiably insane and would, if implemented, return America to an economy that suffered bank panics and depressions every thirty five minutes. They're actually quite good on the big issues, but when you get them into the policy weeds, they look batshit fucking crazy.
Which is what brings me to this;
Remember what I said about Tea Party Republicans running around the country saying impossibly dumb things? Rand Paul's expositions on the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be considered Exhibit A.
Libertarian-minded conservatives should expect questions about the Civil Rights Act. It is to Libertarians what Brown v. Board of Education is to constitutional originalists, something that is generally accepted as morally right, but flies in the face of everything they believe. Of course the Goddamned Liberal Media is going to try to catch you that way.
There actually is a right way to answer such questions. When asked about Brown by a particularly devious New Yorker reporter, Justice Antonin Scalia answered that "even a broken clock is right twice a day." For a guy who has never run for anything, Scalia gave the perfect political answer.
When asked about the Civil Rights Act, the right answer for Paul to give would have been the following: "The Civil Rights Act is settled law, been ruled upon favorably by the Supreme Court multiple times and not something I expect to come up during my tenure in the Senate. Asking me what I would have voted for or against when I was a year old is not unlike asking which side I would have taken in the Greek-Persian Wars."
Instead, he gave the answer he did. And that answer isn't unprincipled, or even constitutionally wrong. It's just politically disastrous.
As liberals never tire of reminding us, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act and won only the six states of the Deep South and Arizona during his presidential campaign that year.
However, Goldwater argued the then-current philosophical point that the federal government didn't have the constitutional right to interfere with the rights of the states of the private property holders. It also didn't hurt that Barry had a long history of battling racism both on the Phoenix city council and in the U.S Senate. As a matter of fact, President Johnson's campaign ran ads in the South pointing out Goldwater's support of every civil rights bill that came before him prior to 1964 as a means of draining support from him.
A broad and deep national consensus formed in favor of the Civil Rights Act, and no serious Republican candidate ever spoke out against it again. That is until Rand Paul opened his pie-hole.
Moreover, Paul is just wrong on the facts. Private segregation was far more of a problem than was the public version, as is evidenced by the hundreds of Title II (more commonly known as the "Public Accommodations Section") lawsuits filed in the United States every week as I write this. Christ, Denny's was accused of discriminating against black agents of the United States Secret Service all the way back in ... 1996.
The free market and the individual states in the South were perpetuating Jim Crow, rather than gradually ending it. By the way, the free market and state's rights didn't accomplish very much in ending the blight of Fascism in Europe, either. The federal government, on the other hand, did.
I assume that you have to be pretty bright to operate on the human eye, so I won't say that Rand Paul is an idiot. But I will say that he never learned that you can be principled and correct, and still be wrong. You can be wrong morally, and you sure as hell be wrong politically. Dr. Paul just doesn't get that he wasn't nominated to re-fight the 1964 presidential campaign.
For the record, I like Rachel Maddow, even though I don't often agree with her politics. She's far more insightful, fair and polite to her guests than anyone else on cable news. Everything that Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are, Maddow isn't. Her show is as close as that forum comes to an actual intellectual exercise and, regardless of her politics, is probably a service to her country.
And she ripped Rand Paul several new assholes this week. I almost felt sorry for him.
Modern politics and media are so brutally twisted that there will never again be a forum like the Federalist Papers, which allow politicians to pontificate at length. If you can't explain your position in less than 30 seconds, you're better off not having a position at all. Just because I think that's intellectually repugnant doesn't mean that it's not a fact of life.
It's also completely beside the point. Rachel Maddow gave Rand Paul 21 minutes to explain his position. 21 minutes on national television, even if it is only MSNBC, is so rare as to be considered to be a gift from God. But even with 21 whole minutes, Dr. Paul couldn't explain his position in a way that didn't make him seem rambling, hopelessly out of touch and quite possibly psychotic.
Worse still, Dr. Paul gave Dr. Maddow the opportunity to do this;
That's powerful, compelling, and utterly fair. Rand Paul hung himself this week. And because the Tea Party went out of their way to champion him, he hung them, too. Dr. Paul's original interview that precipitated this story took place last month. Sarah Palin and the gazillion Tea Party organizations that endorsed him had ample opportunity to reconsider. They didn't. He's now the highest nominated candidate of the Tea Party in the United States.
And now he has the shiny-new endorsement of the Republican party.
Whether it's fair or not, every Republican in the country is going to be asked if he or she stands for or against Rand Paul's position, just as every Democrat was asked whether he or she stood for against things like Code Pink and gay marriage in 2004. And I don't remember many Republicans protesting the questions about Democratic associations being asked eight years ago, which I hope that they understand this year.
If the Democrats are even halfway smart, they will tie the Rand Paul position on Civil Rights around every Republican on the ballot this year and every Republican even thinking about running for president in 2012. After all, what would Karl Rove or Lee Atwater do under similiar circumstances?
I've been screaming for the GOP to separate itself from the amateurish and moronic Tea Party and to return to some semblance of sanity for over a year now. And you know what? I might actually be wrong. It could well be that the Republicans actually elect a bunch of people like Rand Paul, although I seriously doubt it.
Those people aren't like the GOP Class of '94, who themselves were famous for overreach and might have been singularly responsible for Bill Clinton's reelection. These are American jihadis, who are going to be impossible to reelect when passions cool in the next two to six years. If these people get elected now, they'll lose in 2012, '14 and '18.
Unlike the Goldwater debacle of 1964, the Tea Party will be the gift that keeps on giving to Democrats for at least three election cycles to come.
But it isn't like I've been right so far, is it? After all, no one's mentioned the Antichrist yet.
And if that isn't enough, how's this from a national Tea Party Express chairman? Somehow, I just don't see swing voters applauding denunciations of "the terrorists' monkey god," particularly if they, their friends or co-workers happen to be Muslim.
That, my friends, is the chairman of the Tea Party Express and the supposed bride in the shotgun marriage the GOP is celebrating.
I've had this conversation in a roundabout way with a few anti-Muslim political bloggers. The fact is that they aren't convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with them about anything, which is a piss-poor way of winning an election. And the fact that they'd find the same rhetoric that they use against Mulsims turned upon Jews, Christians and Hindus to be outageous is nothing short of hilarious to me. And these are friends of mine.
I pretty much give up. If nothing else, watching the lunatics take over the asylum for awhile might be funny. If no one else cares about what the conservative movement was supposed to be, why should I?
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