Every time Rand Paul opens his mouth, he seems to put both feet and a couple of other appendages in it. There was that unfortunate interview with Rachel Maddow, there was the “couldn’t get any gayer” quip – and now this.
In an alternately opaque and all-too-revealing interview with the Daily Paul web site, in which he tried to explain why he endorsed Mitt Romney, Sen. Paul actually said “It doesn’t mean anything.” I’m sure the Romney campaign will be quite glad to hear that.
However, a few minutes later he was infusing the endorsement with historic significance, telling his no doubt baffled and increasingly skeptical listeners it would open all kinds of doors for the “liberty movement,” among them the promise that “we are going to have a big influence over what happens with the platform.” Citing a laundry list of his own personal legislative goals – legalizing hemp, ending mandatory minimums for nonviolent crimes, auditing the Fed – he declared “we need to look beyond politics.”
To those Ron Paulians still fighting in the trenches – in Iowa, for example, where they won a hard-fought victory, or in Louisiana, where the Romneyites called the cops and shut down the delegate-selection process – hearing this must be absolutely infuriating. While the establishment Republican leadership is using every dirty trick in the book – and a few new ones – to stop Ron Paul’s duly-elected delegates from being seated, their candidate’s son is going over to the enemy!
Psychoanalysts of the Freudian school are sure to have fun with this case – a classic Oedipal conflict, as only a high dramatist like Freud might have imagined it, acted out on the public stage. All that’s missing is the Greek chorus.
