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| Bye, Rand. We hardly knew ye. |
Dismissing Rand Paul as a serious presidential candidate the day he announces seems silly, so I thought I'd wait a couple of days. Okay, it's time: He'll never be president.
When you yell at Savannah Guthrie and others during your campaign rollout week for mentioning all your flip-flops, you point to two problems. One, you're a bit of a hot head, and, two, you've got a lot in your past to dodge. Your Etch-A-Sketch moment is from the git-go, and that's a bad default position to be in.
Here's a quick primer on Rand Paul's tinfoil past from TPM, and it can't be erased in the Internet Age. Josh Marshall lays it out:
Rand Paul, like Ted Cruz, will never be president. It is highly, highly unlikely either will be nominated. No, I will not say this about each candidate who announces. But it is notable that these two - who are essentially media creations - are the first two in. The alleged coalition Paul is striving to create is deeply improbable, if not downright impossible. But quite apart from that, and many other profound liabilities, there's just one that will inevitably sink him: a long, long history of conspiracy theories which are uniformly whacky and often veer into the rantings of the militia, white supremacist and neo-confederate right. [...]Josh goes on to tell about just one speech Rand gave in support of his father in 2008, featuring the NAFTA superhighway and the Amero, a new and dangerous currency. What's worse for Rand is there's a video.
Check it out. Good luck, Rand, getting past your past.
As Josh points out, every GOP candidate isn't going to get laughed off as a nut. I agree. But with their recent reputation for clown-car-ishness, the Republicans should wish they had a way to stop so many people from announcing. But then, welcome to the Tea-Party Age. When your base requires you to be wingnutty, you might have to go wingnutty. And it might not help that you actually have been wingnutty for quite a while.
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