Rand Paul Is His Own Worst Enemy

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

So, it looks like another clown has exited the Republican circus car.

This week’s entry is the junior senator from Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, son of Ron, who threw his hat into the ring in a rally in Louisville. There he promised, as every presidential candidate who ever took the podium has promised, to “take the country back.”

The campaign then showed its modern-day tech savvy by going live on the day of the announcement with a spiffy new campaign website, where you can peruse the candidate’s views on subjects like “Eductation” (that’s how they spelled it).

You can also buy that all-important Rand Paul merchandise, such as a Rand Paul cornhole game, a campaign poster in the form of an eye chart (Dr. Paul’s an ophthalmologist) for only $20.16 (get it?); a blanket with a picture of the Constitution on it (only $75!); and if you’re still craving some of that Constitution-y goodness after a night’s slumber underneath a representation of our nation’s founding document, you can get the senator’s signature on a copy of the Constitution for only a thousand bucks.

So much for the sizzle. How about the steak? Well, if Sen. Paul hews as a presidential candidate to the same positions he’s espoused in the past, he may end up in a spot of trouble with primary voters.

Oh, sure, he hits some of the talking points beloved of the far right, such as a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and a flat tax. He never, of course, fully explains how both of those things can exist at the same time. But then, the libertarian right is known for its embrace of “magical thinking”: If we just believe hard enough, we can make two plus two equal five.

Paul also likes cutting spending, particularly spending on Those People. You know, the poor (working and otherwise), the sick, and of course, children whose parents can’t afford to send them to private schools. He’s proposed budgets that, among other things, eliminate most of the Earned Income Tax Credit; eliminate Section 8 housing vouchers and K-12 education funding; and slash the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

But certain other positions of Dr. Paul are going to be, shall we say, problematic with the GOP base. For one thing, those budget proposals we just talked about would eliminate or drastically reduce all foreign aid — including aid to Israel. “I just don’t think you can give other people’s money away when we can’t rebuild bridges in our country,” he said in 2011.

While the right is all for cutting money for starving black or brown people in furrin lands, they’d cut out one of their own kidneys before they’d deprive Bibi Netanyahu of a single F16 or Iron Dome missile.

Which leads us to Sen. Paul’s defense and foreign policies. His proposed budgets included cuts in defense spending of as much as 30 percent, saying he wants “to reduce the size and scope of the military complex … to one that is more in line with a policy of containment.”

This is going to be anathema to neoconservative hawks who never saw a world problem they weren’t chomping at the bit to “bomb back to the Stone Age” before throwing someone else’s children at it, and for whom the word “containment” is the same as “appeasement.”

(Other words they equate with “appeasement” are “treaty,” “agreement,” “dialogue” and “negotiation” — pretty much any word other than “air strike,” “invasion” or “war.”) His perceived dovishness has led some on the right to begin mobilizing against Dr. Paul. “A group calling for a more hawkish U.S. policy on Iran is prepared to launch a $1 million ad campaign casting him as weak on the issue,” says an article in Politico.

On the campaign trail and in the debates, the Honorable Gentleman from Kentucky is going to find that the GOP may flirt with the type of small-government, low-spending libertarianism he claims to embrace.

But when the last dance is called, they’re going to be in the arms of the defense and Israel lobbyists. And, if by some miracle, Paul survives the primaries and gets the nomination, his budget radicalism will doom him in the general election.

Rand Paul is going to be another candidate who flares brightly and makes it to front-runner status for a week or two, then sputters out when people start using that status to actually take a look at him.

Poor sad clown.

Our Friend Bibi

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

You know, I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I never thought I’d see. I’ve seen a squirrel on water skis. I’ve seen an old man talking to an empty chair on live TV while thousands cheered (and the rest of the world went, “What the [expletive deleted]?”) I’ve seen NC State win a national basketball championship.

But I never thought I’d see the day when one U.S. political party would attempt to score political points by inviting a foreign leader to come to a joint session of Congress and attempt to dictate our military and foreign policy to us.

This past Tuesday, the House Republicans took the unprecedented step of inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to come to the floor of the United States House of Representatives to tell us what to do. This move was taken without consultation with the State Department or the president — a calculated slap in the face to one chief executive by another.

While Mr. Netanyahu took great pains to declare Israel a friend to America and vice versa, I don’t think it would be regarded as a friendly gesture were any U.S. president to bypass diplomatic protocol, go to the Israeli Knesset, and widen already existing rifts between that body and the prime minister by telling Israel everything it’s doing wrong.

Our Friend Bibi’s main topic was, as might be expected, Iran, and let’s just say he’s not a fan of the current talks being held between that country and six world powers, including the U.S., to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. 

He was sharply critical of the “deal” between the two countries, which is curious because, as yet, there is no deal. There are only proposals to which no one has yet agreed.

One of the things that worries Our Friend Bibi (let’s call him OFB for short) about the deal-that-isn’t is that (a) it leaves in place a civilian nuclear program, which he’s concerned could quickly “break out” into a military one, and (b) it expires in 10 years, after which that “breakout time” for a nuclear device would be “very short.”

He demands, in his words, “a better deal.” He did not, however, come up with any proposal for getting Iran to agree to dismantle the civilian program. And it’s a pipedream to believe that they’d do that without the use of force. But don’t worry. If it comes to having to use military force, be it air strikes or boots on the ground, I know OFB would fight to the last drop of American blood. He’s done it before.

Let’s not forget the last time OFB told us who and when we should be fighting. In 2002, he testified to Congress that “there is no question whatsoever that Saddam [Hussein] is seeking, is working, is advancing toward to the development of nuclear weapons,” and that “if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.”

How’d taking that advice work out for us?

As for OFB’s prophecy that, under the deal-that-isn’t, “Iran’s breakout time would be very short,” let us not forget his prior prediction that Iran was only “three to five years” from producing a nuke and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” Only problem is, he said that in 1992 when he was a member of the Israeli parliament, and he’s been singing the same “any minute now” song ever since.

No one wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But in the quest to keep that from happening, we should not be browbeaten into abandoning the quest for a peaceful settlement. If we do go to war with Iran (and sadly, that may yet happen), it needs to be on our timetable, not Netanyahu’s.

No matter how much the “patriots” in the GOP want to poke the president in the eye, it shouldn’t be at the price of outsourcing our military and foreign policy, even to Our Friend Bibi, a blustering bully whose advice has been so disastrously wrong for us before.