The amnesty of a lesser god: Senator Rand Paul eviscerated Ted Cruz who was for legalization of illegal immigrants in 2013

From the transcript of last night's debate, here, where Senator Rand Paul called BS on Cruz' poison pill argument and showed that Cruz was sincerely for legalization, a lesser form of amnesty but an amnesty no less:

PAUL: I was there and I saw the debate. I saw Ted Cruz say, "we'll take citizenship off the table, and then the bill will pass, and I'm for the bill."

The bill would involve legalization. He can't have it both ways. But what is particularly insulting, though, is that he is the king of saying, "you're for amnesty." Everybody's for amnesty except for Ted Cruz.

But it's a falseness, and that's an authenticity problem -- that everybody he knows is not as perfect as him because we're all for amnesty. I was for legalization. I think, frankly, if you have border security, you can have legalization. So was Ted, but now he says it wasn't so. That's not true.

---------------------------------------------------------

Trump not participating last night did two useful things:

It made the debate Pig Pile on Cruz night.

And it gave Rand Paul a spot to come back to the main stage and make this argument.

Trump wins again.

First term senators shouldn't even be running for president: Rand Paul (2010), Marco Rubio (2010) and Ted Cruz (2012)

Elected to the US Senate in 2004

"For six years, Republicans have said the nation made a mistake electing a one term Senator the President of the United States. Why should you, a one term Senator, be the GOP’s nominee?" 

-- Erick Erickson, here

Rand Paul pledges to do everything he can to stop Trump, and then support him if he's the nominee

Rand Paul, quoted here:

"He would be a disaster. We’ll be slaughtered in a landslide. That’s why my every waking hour is to try to stop Donald Trump from being our nominee. It sounds terrible, 'Oh you're going to support Donald Trump,' but I expect Donald Trump to support me as well if I win."

Rand Paul: Carly Fiorina has ZERO trouble making it back from commercial breaks

Here.

Rand Paul agrees with us: Ted Cruz' 2013 amendment was NOT "the poison pill" and seriously intended legalization of illegal aliens

Rand Paul, quoted here:

"Without question, Rubio and Cruz have been for amnesty," Paul told The Washington Post in a call with reporters today. "It’s kind of a silly debate. The amendment Cruz put forward was not intended to be a poison pill. It was for legalization." ... "I think Cruz is being disingenuous and not honestly describing what he did," Paul said. "He’s wanting to have it both ways. I don’t think there’s any contemporary evidence he was putting forward something he didn’t believe in. It makes you wonder whether or not we can take him at face value on other issues."

Rand Paul emphasizes debt is our biggest threat in closing remarks in tonight's CNN debate

He says it over and over again to no effect, but he is surely right.

The country wasn't built and didn't become great on debt, it was built on Protestant thrift.

Rand Paul focuses on why Obama is unqualified for office, not Trump

Here.

Rand Paul's warped view of unfunded liabilities

"Your grandparents had too many kids."

No Rand, we didn't have enough.

Libertarian moron.

Sean Hannity the hypocrite: Shocked Rand Paul criticizes Ted Cruz while the three of them have ripped fellow Republicans for years

Well, I say "fellow Republican" advisedly. What they are is libertarians, and put three libertarians in a room, or 300, all you'll get is dissension.

Sean Hannity isn't a Republican, by his own admission, but likes to play in its sandbox. Rand Paul is self-consciously "purple", imagining that right and left can be united as libertarians as opposed to remaining separated as conservatives and liberals. And Ted Cruz' behavior in the Senate makes him a RINO, at least from the RINOS' perspective.

Audio here.

The libertarian wing of the Republican Party would rather spend its time eating one other than uniting to fight Democrats.

They can't agree on anything, can't function as members of a party, and will never be able to run a country, except into the ground.

Libertarian impotence: Purple PAC suspends raising money for Rand Paul but has spent next to nothing on him all year

Amazing but true.

Reported here:

“I don’t want to raise money for a futile crusade,” [Ed Crane of Cato fame] said. “I still hope to raise money for him, but not until I see a concerted effort to get back to the roots that got him where he was for a while.” . . .

Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Mr. Paul’s campaign, said, “It is untruthful for a story to say that this super PAC stopped supporting Sen. Paul, when in fact they don’t seem to have lifted a finger in the first place.”

The group spent less than $8,000 in the first half of the year.

Purple PAC raised $1.2 million in the first half of the year, $1 million of which came from Jeff Yass, owner of the trading firm Susquehanna Partners. Mr. Crane said he had not consulted with Mr. Yass on his decision to suspend fundraising. The super PAC currently has $1.4 million on hand, which it won’t spend until Mr. Crane feels more positively about Mr. Paul’s campaign, he said.

Rand Paul and Chris Christie, Nos. 8 & 9 in the polls, attack No. 1 Donald Trump

He's a lumberjack . . . he's OK

Rand Paul mocked Trump here in the middle of the week while affecting the country style, promptly fleeing the country to do a medical mission in Haiti this weekend. Not quite the same stuff as suspending the campaign to go to Washington to vote for bailouts like McCain did in 2008, but combined with his record of disdain for fundraising and his reaction to the legal trouble hitting his campaign team just before the Ohio debate, running away is what it looks like. Bad optics, so to speak.

And speaking of bad optics, an unsuited Chris Christie here called The Donald unsuited to be the president while wearing a pastel sport shirt, saying a President Trump simply can't tell Speaker Boehner he's fired. Well, not dressed like that.

Easter's over governor

It takes a lunatic to know a lunatic: Rand Paul says Trump supporters have lost their minds

Look who's crazy now.

Seen here:

"I think this is a temporary sort of loss of sanity. But we're going to come back our senses and look for somebody serious to lead the country at some point," he said.

------------------------------------

This from the guy who imagined the Republican Party was ready to become a more self-consciously libertarian big tent party. Rand Paul is currently running a distant seventh for the Republican nomination with 5.5% support.

Crackpot Rand Paul thinks proportional justice is putting James Clapper and Edward Snowden in the same jail cell

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Snowden's already in a jail cell. It's called exile. He gave up everything to defend a principle Americans used to believe in.

Meanwhile Clapper lied under oath and obstructed justice, did not lose his job, and will not lose any of his taxpayer-funded retirement, but the government's violation of Americans' fourth amendment rights continues unabated.

Video here.

Delusional Rand Paul might as well run as a Democrat, blames Republicans for creating ISIS

Rand Paul, quoted here:

"ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’ job even easier. They created these people."

--------------------------------

ISIS wouldn't exist if Obama hadn't pulled out of Iraq, had not opposed Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria and the state of Israel, and let ISIS' leader out of Camp Bucca.

Libertarian disunity on display in massive field aspiring to 2016 GOP nomination

14 GOP aspirants to date

Liberals have one serious candidate and a few other aspirants defining their side, but Republicans have twice as many with no clear front runner. This is because Republicanism is now overcome by a libertarianism which by definition is unable to agree about much of anything. It is a shrill and brittle ideology of "freedom from" instead of a more modest philosophical meditation about "freedom for". The latter recognizes that freedom is not an absolute, and is what conservatism is all about, but today you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone talking about that in the Republican Party, much less anywhere else.

7 Democrat aspirants to date

Why did Senator No Pants Paul vote against subpoenaing a fraudulent congressional application to DC's health exchange?

Maybe there's less to Rand Paul than meets the eye.

The story is unpacked here.

Rand Paul steals Joe Biden's thunder, supports the creation of a Kurdish state

December 1, 2011

Rand Paul, quoted here:

"I think they would fight like hell if we promised them a country. It’s a little easier to say than it is to actually make it happen, because in order to actually draw a new country you’d have to have the complicity of Turkey and probably Iraq a little bit as well. There really is no Syria to be complicit with, but there is just a little piece of Syria—Kobani and in there is predominantly Kurdish. I think if you did that and could get piece peace between the Kurds and the Turks, and then the Turks would actually fight if the Kurds would give up any claim to Turkish territory."

Joe Biden, discussed here in early 2014:

Although Biden denied it at the time [of the 2007 troop surge], his proposal would almost certainly have led to the de facto soft partition of Iraq into three autonomous regions dominated by Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. A similar approach in the 1990s patched together Bosnia out of the detritus of the Balkans civil war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. In a 2007 op-ed, Biden warned, "If the United States can't put this federalism idea on track, we will have no chance for a political settlement in Iraq and, without that, no chance for leaving Iraq without leaving chaos behind."

Senator Rand Paul is clearly desperate for attention, accuses Jeb Bush of marijuana hypocrisy

Seen here:

Paul, who like Bush is considering whether to seek the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, contrasted Bush's opposition to legalizing medical marijuana with his admitted drug use while a student at Phillips Academy, an elite prep school in Andover, Mass.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Notice the libertarian Paul isn't going after Bush's amnesty stand. No, it's not that Jeb isn't conservative enough, it's that he isn't libertarian enough.

Meanwhile Scott Walker and Jeb Bush have sucked all the air out of Rand Paul's room. Paul is way back in the polling, pulling 9.5% compared to 13% and 14.5% for the respective front runners in the latest Real Clear Politics average.

At this stage of the game it looks like this is going to be a Bush Walker ticket in 2016.

Liberal Salon and libertarian Rand Paul both show their true colors: a shushing they will go

The episode, summarized here, shows the true colors of the politically related liberals and libertarians. Silencing speech is what they are both about, all the while claiming to champion it. Accordingly both resort to the ad hominem: Rand Paul is a "brat" to Salon while he says liberals typically need to "calm down", implying emotional inferiority.

I wonder if Joan Walsh protested being used in this way. And I do mean used: She never once suggests Rand Paul should be shushed, but the headline writer at Salon sure did the dirty work for her. Don't kid yourself. She was OK wit dat.

Sen. Rand Paul learns nothing from Cantor loss, joins immigration amnesty fanatics lead by Grover Norquist

Libertarians of a feather quack together.

Story here:

A top Paul aide confirmed the alliance of Mr. Paul and Mr. Norquist on immigration reform, after The Times received a copy of an email sent to Republicans, Democrats, independents and others thought to be open to some kind of reform.