Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Rand Paul Double-Take

Someone help me out here. How does a guy who says

We don't want our records to be sifted through by a government without judicial review... They don't want to vote on this because they know the American people agree with us.

then go on to say

I'm not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But 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.

Not only does that not seem like a coherent stance to take from a theoretical standpoint, but it doesn't seem like good politics either. The people to whom Rand Paul is pandering in the second quote must surely also disagree with his position vis-a-vis the Patriot Act.

You gotta wonder what's actually driving Sen. Paul; sometimes he takes libertarian positions and sometimes he doesn't, but its not all all clear what motivates him to go one way or the other. Even the hypothesis that he's racist, which seems to get trotted out from time to time, doesn't have much explanatory power in this instance. He's against the Patriot Act even though it certainly inconveniences non-Caucasians more than it does Caucasians while, at the same time, suggesting measures that would entangle all those sovereign citizen/militia types. Honestly, the best answer at this point is that he's just not thinking about things very hard.

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