If They Can't Defeat Rand Paul on Ideas They Try to Defeat Him through Guilt by Association

Today in the Free Beacon is an article by Alana Goodman (formerly of the knee jerk anti-Rand Paul crew at Commentary) on Jack Hunter, who helped Rand Paul write his 2011 book "The Tea Party Goes to Washington" and apparently runs his Twitter feed.  It's basically a "gotcha" type article that attempts to smear Rand Paul with the past of one of his employees.  Hunter's crime?  Being in the League of the South, a nonviolent southern nationalist organization 15 years ago and not liking Abraham Lincoln very much.  Oh the horror.  

Now, I'm not saying that I would ever go to a League of the South meeting with my Super Jew shirt on or anything but it seems to me that if Obama can cavort with the likes of Reverend Wright, Louis Farrakhan and Bill Ayers for years then how does it make sense to attack Rand Paul for the prior associations of his Twitter feed writer?  Besides Jack Hunter has already renounced his views and seems pretty sensitive these days as you can see from his article on gay marriage and the civil rights struggle written back in April:

The 20-something me would consider the 30-something me a bleeding-heart liberal. Though I still hate political correctness, I no longer find it valuable to attack PC by charging off in the opposite direction, making insensitive remarks that even if right in fact were so wrong in form. I'm not the first political pundit to use excessive hyperbole. I might be one of the few to admit being embarrassed about it.

This embarrassment is particularly true concerning my own region, the South, where slavery, segregation, and institutional racism left a heavy mark. I still detest those on the left and right who exploit racial tension for their own purposes. But I detest even more the inhumanity suffered by African-Americans in our early and later history. T.S. Eliot said, "humankind cannot bear too much reality," and it is impossible for those of us living in the new millennium to comprehend that absolute horror of being treated like chattel by your fellow man, or being terrorized by your neighbors, because of the color of your skin.

Books, memorials, and museums will never be able to adequately convey such tragedy, at least not in any manner remotely comparable to the pain of those who lived it.

...

There have been instances during the gay-rights movement that arguably could be compared to the black civil rights struggle, like the Stonewall riots of the 1960s or Matthew Shepard murder in 1998. Suicides and other problems related to public attitudes about homosexuality have also unquestionably been a horrible ordeal. Still, with the possible exception of the mistreatment of Native Americans, there has been nothing quite like the systematic exploitation and institutional degradation experienced by earlier black Americans.

My purpose here is not to belittle the fight for gay marriage, only to note that those who keep attempting to draw a reasonable comparison to the struggle of African-Americans are in many ways belittling the black experience in the United States.