Spinning the Rand Paul Disaster

No sooner did my column on the shortcomings of Rand Paul appear online then Brian Doherty was out with a long blog post on the Reason magazine web site, which starts out:

“I’m already hearing whispers especially from the antiwar libertarian hardcore that a strangely respectful and nuanced profile of the GOP Senate candidate from Kentucky via The New Republic‘s Jason Zengerle in GQ is giving them all the more reason to dislike or fear him.”

Respectful? The article is illustrated with a photo of Rand sitting in what looks like a television studio dressed in a suit and tie from the waist up, and yellow madras Bermuda shorts. He’s wearing dress shoes, and no socks. His face bears the expression of an errant schoolboy who’s been kept after school, his cheeks puffed out like an exasperated blowfish. Zengerles’ kindest description of the candidate, eagerly cited by Doherty, reads as follows:

“Unlike some of the prominent Tea Party leaders he’s routinely lumped in with, Paul is not an idiot.”

Doherty’s reaction – he’s thrilled by such extravagant praise — must leave his libetarian readers baffled, who don’t understand what a high it is to be considered undiotic by an editor of The New Republic.

Truly a pathetic display, one that reveals the existence of yet a new libertarian faction: the libertarian masochists. The piece goes downhill from there, as Doherty tries to frame the growing intra-libertarian debate over the Rand Paul sellout as just a lot of noise made by a few noisome dissenters of the “hardcore” variety:

“Unpromising indeed for those who love Rand’s dad Ron’s political bravery and sense on matters of foreign intervention. And I understand why that is infuriating to the extent that Rand is seen as some sort of gold standard for what “libertarian” or even “libertarian-leaning” is going to mean in American politics. But if you are just looking at him as a potential Senate candidate for the Republican Party, well, that means that maybe he’ll be just as bad as every single other one of them on foreign policy. Disappointing, yes, but not infuriating.”

Not unless you’re one of the thousands of libertarians who, prompted by the endorsement of Rand’s father, either gave money or else were talked into actively campaigning for him – in which case waking up to find that you’ve elected someone “just as bad as every single other one of them on foreign policy” would indeed be infuriating.

Doherty then rhapsodizes about all the really really great things Senator Paul will be able to do: form a “Tea Party caucus” in the Senate, alongside Sharon Angle and Jim DeMint – a caucus, by the way, that is opposed by the actual tea party movement, but never mind that. He cites Zengerle, who avers:

“It’s one thing to oppose Obama; it’s another to oppose legislation and threaten relationships that have been central to how the GOP does business.”

Oh, and what are these “relationships” that are “central” to the GOP establishment’s machinations? “Paul doesn’t support the military spending most of his fellow Republicans slobber over” –- perhaps once, but if Kristol, Senor, and Donnelly didn’t talk him out of that, then AIPAC surely did.

“He doesn’t support handing out big fat prescription-drug benefits to private insurance companies.” – well, maybe, but he sure opposes any reform of Medicare, meaning any cuts in the program, and no wonder: a great deal of his medical patients are Medicare clients.

“He doesn’t support the earmarks that Republican senators, especially McConnell, use to curry favor with voters back home” – this is a phony issue. As Ron Paul has correctly pointed out, earmarks merely mean that money goes to local projects instead of into a general nationalized fund to be disbursed by Washington bureaucrats. Opposition to earmarks is hardly “libertarian.”

Doherty enthuses: “What sensible American doesn’t say hoo-damn-ray to that?” Nice try, Brian, but my own response is so the f—k what? And just when you thought Doherty couldn’t be more unconvincing if he tried, he outdoes himself by defending the likening of Obama to … Hitler. Or to the rise of Hitler: or something like that. Oh, and to top it off we are told Rand violates Godwin’s Law “with nuance and intelligence,” no less!

Poor Doherty: faced with the Sisyphean task of “spinning” what Andrew Sullivan accurately calls Zengerles’ “hit piece” as evidence of a Strange New Respect for Rand Paul, he pulls out all the stops – to no avail. In the end, he is reduced to this:

“The [Zengerle] piece leaves me feeling about Rand Paul as I already did: not as good as his dad; likely better than every other Senator of his party. And it leaves me a little more sure that any success he has won’t be successfully used to shame or marginalize the domestic limited-government movement writ large (except to the extent that it distances it from anti-interventionism, which remains lamentable).”

Lamentable, but not essential – because it’s “hoo-damn ray” for Rand Paul, who thinks Obama is a Nazi, and is “solicitous” of an organization plumbing for war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. Only the “antiwar hardcore” libertarians care about such things: little matter that this is the majority of libertarians in the US.

What I find troubling is that the same magazine that ran countless article smearing the elder Paul as a racist, an anti-Semite, and a embarrassment to the libertarian movement — written largely by a writer who is today employed as a professional anti-libertarian smear-monger for Slate.com and MSNBC —  is now extolling Paul the Lesser, who is a genuine embarrassment and openly panders to racist anti-Muslim hysteria. There’s an agenda here, but what is it: moral inversion? Bizarro World “logic”? Or simply a desire to sell out for the lowest possible price?