Andrew McCarthy on Rand Paul's Superiority to John McCain and Lindsey Graham

Andrew McCarthy calls out the Republican establishment for being weak on defense while pretending to be strong:

You won't ever hear Paul echoing McCain's assertion that the way to get foreign policy "back on track" would be to put John Kerry and Joe Biden in charge of it. You won't find Paul, like McCain and Graham, toasting Qaddafi one minute, then in the next calling for his head; or condemning the Muslim Brotherhood's sharia totalitarianism one minute, then in the next calling for Americans to work with and subsidize the Brothers. You won't find Paul, in vertiginous McCain fashion, blathering about democracy-promotion and global stability while championing the secession from Serbia of a Muslim state — Kosovo, which now stands as a breakaway inspiration to Islamic-supremacist insurgents the world over. You won't find Paul lamenting, à la Graham, that "free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war"; to the contrary, Paul appears to grasp that if you are prepared to subordinate the First Amendment to a desire not to pull the hair-trigger savagery of your enemies, then you have already lost the war.

In this sense, Dr. Paul perfectly diagnoses the GOP's sorry condition after years on the McCain/Graham regimen: "When you saw the debate between President Obama and Romney on foreign policy, they sounded pretty similar. In the vice-presidential debate, Biden was more assertive, but Ryan didn't disagree with most of his positions."

Bingo: It has been a while since Republicans were led by a Reagan — by someone who looks totalitarianism in the eye and calls it what it is. You don't hear today's GOP saying of the Muslim Brotherhood and its sharia-supremacist allies, "We win, they lose." Today's GOP is more likely to tell the Muslim Brotherhood, "We're here to partner with you." Today's GOP looks at ideologues who promise to conquer the West and sees not an "evil empire" but a "Religion of Peace." Yes, it was Obama who opted to arm and fund the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt — where a new sharia constitution has been imposed, women are thus reduced to a lower caste, and minority Christians are systematically persecuted. But it was Republicans who voted decisively to approve these measures.

To his great credit, Senator Paul tried to stop our government's transfer of F-16 aircraft and Abrams tanks to Egypt. He certainly has that half of the equation right. At Heritage, he observed that while "the war is not with Islam but with a radical element of Islam — the problem is that this element is no small minority but a vibrant, often mainstream, vocal and numerous minority."