The Lesson of Rand Paul

[mgc1961]

Rand Paul blew up the Internet. Did you notice? Here's how it went down: first, he suggested unmistakably that he opposed the Civil Rights Act. Then he tried unsuccessfully to weasel his way out, under near-implacable questioning. This was when people got really worked up. So Paul put out a press release, the strategy of which was more or less to deny that the previous 24 hours had happened. In the meantime, those of us who hail from the Internet have lost the ability to talk about anything else.

Mainly, of course, we've been condemning and mocking Paul. But there's a group that’s lined up to defend him as well. The basic claim is that, while Paul was of course wrong to oppose civil rights legislation, it was an honest and respectable mistake. As Dave Weigel put it on Twitter (hence the weird sentence), "Rand doesn't mean harm, is suffering as old libertarian debate moves into prime time." (Weigel wrote a longer defense of Paul yesterday as well. For an excellent response, see this post from Salon editor Joan Walsh.)

Various figures who stand a few notches in toward the mainstream from Paul have made arguments similar to Weigel's. It was a mere theoretical fancy, they say, nothing should be made of it. A staffer for Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., calls the whole thing "a non-issue." Thanks, white people, for clearing up that whole civil rights thing for everybody else. Not important!


Continue reading at http://www.salon.com/news/libertarianism/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/05/21/libertarianism_who_needs_it