Rand Paul has never wavered on Civil Rights:Except that one time:
That’s not, like, really wavering, right? That’s just sort of wavering.
Maybe we should let the free market decide.
The latest on #TWiBRadio, #TeamBlackness obviously Rand Paul explaining how voting works to a group of students at an historically black college isn’t accidentally racist or anything, historian superhero Dr. Blair Kelley calls in on the black phone, and since when is saying ‘nigger rigging’ ever okay?
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Then, on #amTWiB, L.Joy and company discuss porn in the Vatican, McConnell’s got bugs in his office, and Elon makes a surprise ‘visit’ to the show.
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And lastly, we had a bit of a tech hiccup, so in case you missed our discussion of the epic pundit fail on Hannity last week, it’s magical:
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AxelFoley
Fuckin’ win with that first pic! LOLOLOLOLOLOL
gwangung
Dude should really make a better effort. This was real half ass on his part; even a lot of white people are shaking their heads.
(ETA: Well, except Sully, of course. He’s dependable to be a gullible goober).
danielx
Clearly just another white boy lost in the blues.
minutemaid
The most important question is…where does he stand on CHAINED CPI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
If he is against it then he is awesome and all true progressives should volunteer to make him president. Don’t worry about the whole wanting to get rid of the civil rights act and child labour laws. We can ignore those two minor details.
lojasmo
@minutemaid:
SO yesterday.
Where is he on MONSANTO?
Monsanto is the new Drooooones!
Yutsano
@minutemaid: Derp.
catclub
Any hints for where in the “How not to be a pundit” stream to listen? The whole thing is two hours. All of which _could_ be great.
Baud
FWIW, Rand Paul has never wavered on his civil rights.
Anonymous37
Someone else must have pointed this out already, but I’ll go ahead and say it, just in case: giving a speech at Howard University that goes over badly is a plus with the Republican primary field.
The point of Rand Paul’s speech was not to get the Howard students to nod in agreement, or even to respectfully disagree while acknowledging that Paul was making an argument that required addressing. Those sorts of responses would hurt Paul when it comes to fundraising.
Rand Paul’s entire political career to date has handled race deftly when it comes to getting elected and in maximizing his appeal to Republican primary voters. He has a campaign manager who sends out racist e-mails. He then pretends to be shocked — shocked! — that such a person would be voting for him, and fires him. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. More racists aren’t angry that he dumped the guy; they’re smart enough to know that that sort of open bigotry won’t play, and they appreciate that Rand Paul was close to the guy in the first place. Moderate Kentucky Republicans, or at least the more moderate Kentucky Republicans, give him credit for dumping the guy and somehow ignore the fact that Rand Paul was close enough to Chris Hightower to make him his campaign manager yet somehow didn’t know he was a vile racist. Libertarians and Firebaggers ignore all of that and focus on his inconsistent bullshit grandstanding against drone strikes.
So if it works, why not try it again? The last Republican on the national stage with any significant popularity who attempted to actually treat black Americans as human beings and find real common cause with them, Jack Kemp, went nowhere with his Presidential campaign. So there’s a ritual that most Republicans with Presidential aspirations undergo: they go to the NAACP or Howard, give speeches designed to draw boos, and throw up their hands and claim that they tried to reason with African-Americans, but they just wouldn’t see the light.
Look, in the case of Rand Paul, this is a good thing for us: he can’t win the nomination, let alone the Presidency, but the longer he stays viable, the harder it will be for the eventual nominee. He can only serve to heighten divisions in the GOP, and those fissures won’t heal 100% by the general election. And he’s better at this than his daddy, making things that much worse for the party. So three cheers for Rand Paul, delusional spoiler.
geg6
@lojasmo:
Amanda Marcotte’s completely right today on this issue. A portion of the left has gone so far around the bend (Truthers, anti-vaxers, GM foods) that they are virtually indistinguishable from the far right crazies. They live in proudly ignorant fear, spinning ridiculous conspiracy theories, home schooling their kids and loudly proclaiming their moral superiority. There’s really no difference between them and often they intersect. I’m of the opinion that the far left is, deep down, as authoritarian and hostile to reality and science as your worst winger.
jl
I read a report that Paul stood up in front the audience at Howard and apparently sincerely asked whether they knew that Frederick Douglass was Republican.
Seriously?
I wonder exactly how surprised Paul was that they knew about Douglass party ID already?
Maybe Pauld decided to skip explaining that Lincoln was a Republican too? Or what a Dixiecrat was?
I’m sure he was going to skip the part about where the Dixiecrats went.
Sad performance by Paul. The GOP outreach program for non-rich people could backfire worse than I suspected. It may reveal way too much about GOP attitudes towards anyone who is not rich or not white. It may reveal too much about what a clueless wonderland rich white GOPers live in.
Hal
@lojasmo:
Yeesh. I had multiple posts on Facebook from friends saying “While you were paying attention to , President Obama signed the Monsanto Protection act!!”
I hate it when people make up names for bills because saying President Obama signed Senate appropriations bill with a rider attached just isn’t sexy enough.
Also, someone really needs to remind Rand Paul of the existence of Youtube and the Internet, because he has apparently forgot.
Honestly, this is what happens when Progressives spend days patting this asshole on the back for being more to the left of Obama on Drones!!! Which of course he is not. Now the MF thinks he can fool everyone into believing he’s actually sane.
I also love that Paul’s history of the Republican party in regards to African Americans only includes event from a century and a half ago.
Baud
@efgoldman:
I’d rate him a narcissist.
jl
@Anonymous37:
Then the speech was a success maybe for Paul individually. Or reactionary GOPers in some parts of the country. Or in an effort to keep the GOP entrenched as a regional race-based party that can maintain enough House seats to block changes for awhile.
I can see how it was an success at making the GOP appear more ridiculous to the average voter nationwide.
Eric U.
@Hal: we sold some Monsanto stock last year, I think we got it when monsanto bought part of another company we owned stock in. Made almost $3k on a $300 investment. They have done pretty well for themselves, apparently
minutemaid
@lojasmo: Now that Jane Hamsher has declared bankrupcy and Kucinich has sold out to Fux like anyone with half a brain knew he would, there has been a huge void in the faux outrage daily world of firebaggers and is just too big for morons like Greenwald to fill.
Who will be the next Hamsher hero to the left. Stay tuned for more people trying to sell books and ad clicks to find out. CHAINED CPI is their golden ticket….or not!
Hal
BTW, how is someone accidentally racist? Also, I love that the guy serving Paisley is black. It couldn’t be a cop giving him a ticket or one of his kids teachers?
Anonymous37
@jl: Sure, but your Rand Pauls can enjoy a fair amount of success getting elected to conservative statewide offices while failing completely to convert that popularity to the national stage.
And looking more ridiculous to national swing voters is the price Republicans have to pay to win the Presidential nomination. The tricky part is to make the 180 to the general election. Romney started to pull this off in the first debate, but couldn’t follow through.
What we have to worry about is a more skilled politician in the GOP pulling this off. I don’t worry about Rand Paul winning the Presidency. If I’m wrong, well, a Rand Paul Presidency will be punishment enough for me.
Anonymous37
He then pretends to be shocked — shocked! — that such a person would be voting for him, and fires him.
Oops, that should be working for him. Clearly 5 minutes isn’t enough for me to edit out all of my mistakes.
Mnemosyne
@lojasmo:
I just found out that there’s a name for this kind of misdirection: it’s called a Jesus Juke, and it’s meant to make you feel guilty for not talking/thinking about the thing that the other person is feeling self-righteous about:
The things you learn when B-J is down for a whole day …
raven
Man, Chris Hayes has Jack Abramhoff and George A. Papandreous on!
AxelFoley
@efgoldman:
Just de-lovely and delicious
grooveisintheheart.com
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@efgoldman: Malice born of clueless arrogance. I don’t care if he made it through Duke medical school, I stand by my belief he is, fundamentally, a moron.
lojasmo
@geg6:
This is exactly right, and is something I have asserted since the 2008 primaries when the hillbots went over the edge.
OmerosPeanut
He did his best to whitespain’ his stance on the Civil Rights Act. What more could they want?
Keith G
@Eric U.: Hopefully Monsanto stock will take a bit of a dip as more connections between their one of their lines of products and hive collapse become more understood. Not every problem can be solved with more pesticide, natural or not.
Chris
@Anonymous37:
Yep. Most of them probably didn’t blame Rand Paul, they blamed the politically correct liberal media and dirty fucking hippies for putting so much pressure on him that he had to fire the poor man.
Agreed, I think. I’m waiting for the moment when one of these people is so delusional (and has enough support for the base) that he actually splits off into a third party candidacy in a national election. That’ll be the gold.
Chris
@efgoldman:
Yep. And that’s the real reason why “both sides do it” has always been a pile of bullshit.
Scamp Dog
I really wanted the “I’m just a white man” image to have “in Hammersmith Palais” at the bottom. Not that the line would fit Rand Paul in any way, it’s just what my Clash fan-boy brain immediately leaped to. See this.
Cacti
Rand Paul whitesplains black history to the students of one of the premier HBCUs.
Facepalm.
Lyrebird
@Cacti: Yeah, that was the best part. Waffle words about his criticisms of the Civil Rights Act? Expected. Letting his utterly-sheltered-condescending-horse’s-ass flag fly so openly? Added bonus. Rachel Maddow had fun with this, *and* brought back Paul’s unbelievably bad outreach to Hispanic business-owner types. (He likens his admiration for Latinos’ romantic culture to Seinfeld’s attraction to Asian women. I wish I were joking!!!) (can’t link right, can find it on Raw Story)
AA+ Bonds
@Anonymous37:
Hey, I’ll go ahead and say it: libertarians agree with him on the public accommodations and employment aspects of civil rights – namely, that they shouldn’t exist – and are practical racists themselves.
Everything Rand Paul does for the Kluxers, he does for the libertarians. He threads the needle just like his old man.
Libertarians simply don’t care whether black people are discriminated against; they think that it is the right of white people to practice discrimination. High-mindedness doesn’t make them not racist. A failure to wear white hoods or forward pictures of Obama as a “witch doctor” doesn’t make them not racist. They are racist because they think racism is just.
That comes from both a conscious and less-than-conscious lack of empathy with non-whites. It proves their racism.
And this is the “distinction” that over-thinking liberals make with Rand Paul, to be “fair” to him, like Joan Walsh did back during his Senate campaign – and it’s part of what keeps him and his ilk alive politically.
AA+ Bonds
@minutemaid:
This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever seen posted on Balloon Juice.
AA+ Bonds
@geg6:
You got perfect aim at that foot of yours.
AA+ Bonds
Liberals: no one is giving you points for ranting that the people in your coalition, who vote for your candidates, are just as bad as the people you hate the most. No one is handing out ribbons and medals for Most Intricate and Unlikely Democrats-I-Dislike-Will-Surely-Vote-Libertarian Persecution Fantasy of the Year.
Don’t live in Glenn Greenwald’s world. It’s much nicer out here in the real one.
The irony is that the “far right is the same as the far left” line often enough comes from the same place as the four-point political compass: that tiny, worthless gaggle of loony libertarians who think Rand Paul is the bees’ knees . . . they aren’t a threat to liberal vote totals, but they seem to be a threat to the cognitive ability of many self-loathing liberals.
Chris
@AA+ Bonds:
It’s the racism of “I want to screw over black people” versus that of “I don’t care if black people are screwed over.”
A staggering amount of white dudes believe that falling into the latter category somehow makes them not racist.
Sly
@minutemaid:
If you forget my gold chains, I’ll forget your CPI chains.
Bruce S
@minutemaid:
This is childish BS – trying to pitch re-treaded, irrelevant straw men to avoid dealing with the actual substance of a particular issue. This adolescent indirection, dependent on nonsensical personal attacks that are irrelevant to the issue and “connecting” conspiratorial dots that you’ve essentially fabricated, is on par with a FOX News opinionater. If you have a problem with people like Campaign for America’s Future, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich or Jared Bernstein, who are critical of chained CPI, go for it. I’m sure you’re capable of making a coherent…oh, wait a minute! Truth is you’re just crapping your own pants with this mess.
Of course, the reality of our internets is that I’m an idiot for spending a minute on obsessive cranks such as yourself.
Dacia
@catclub: You can find the “How Not to be a Pundit” section at about the 19:00 mark.
Paul in KY
@jl: I’m guessing the audience also knew a few recent Repubs, such as
Strom Thurmond
Jesse Helms
A Humble Lurker
@Bruce S:
Dude, it’s just a call back to the highlighting of Paul’s (apparent) disapproval of drones. I’d say it’s relevant, at least to a point.