No, Rand passed over lightly the Republicans’ recent record. He didn’t mention that Ronnie loathed the American Civil Rights Movement, which he regarded as a communist plot from the get-go. He didn’t mention how Ronnie tried to give tax breaks to segregated academies and segregated colleges in the South, and how he tried to “stand up” for apartheid, though he let neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz talk him out of it. He forgot about Ronnie going to Philadelphia, Mississippi after winning the Republican nomination in 1980 and talking about “states’ rights” and not about the murders of three civil rights workers in June of 1964, murders that had gone unpunished. Or about Ronnie talking up a “Chicago welfare queen” who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for “four nonexistent deceased husbands,” bilking the government out of “over $150,000.” The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. But facts never slowed Ronnie down.†
Oh, and faulting today’s Republican Party for trying to discourage black voting? Why, that’s “demeaning the horror” of what the Democrats did before Paul was born.
Facts just didn’t slow Rand down very much. He claimed that he had “always” supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite the fact that he had explained in detail waaay back in 2010 that he didn’t, because private businesses should have the right to discriminate if they want to. Rand also said that he’d introduced legislation that would repeal mandatory federal drug sentences. As Mike Riggs points out, over at Reason, that’s not what Paul’s bill would do. Moreover, Riggs notes, Paul has explicitly stated that he’s in favor of jail time for drug possession, just not lots of jail time.
Paul also claimed that gasoline is $4 a gallon because of the budget deficit. Rand, I think the real cause is markets. You know, supply and demand.
*Well, that may or may not be so. But it is a fact that Rand Paul did quote T.S. Eliot when speaking before the kids at Howard, and if he does that in Kentucky, I haven’t heard about it.
†What was most offensive about Ronnie’s little homily was his implicit claim that his mythical villainess was a “typical” welfare recipient.
