Rush Limbaugh Sides with Rand Paul over McCain and Graham

I don't usually pay attention to Rush Limbaugh but this rant seems to have been pretty good.  Conor Friedersdorf from the Atlantic has certainly taken notice.  Here are some key excerpts from Rush:

{Rand Paul}'s now a national figure. He wasn't wild-eyed and screaming and pounding. He was very rational and very reasonable. He was asking a very simple, easily explained and understood question... So it was easily understood. It was a very simple question he was posing, and all this was going on while our guys are out dining with Obama, dining with the architect of this current nationwide mess. Rand Paul was standing up opposing this while these guys were out yukking it up with the architect of it all. You know it was a great example of the ruling class and the country class, and the ruling class not liking what this country class senator was doing. It's no more complicated than that, but a lot of people are ticked off about this, too.

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But he has the nation captivated. It's caused a real reversal. Not a reversal, but the whole structure of things has now been upset, and it's got a lot of people concerned, and it has legs. It does have legs. So I think it's fascinating to behold, and once again it illustrates that these guys going to dinner with Obama, they were not challenging him.

They were not. People think this country is falling apart. People think that this country's on its last legs as they know it, as it was founded. People in this country are really scared. There is a despondency among the population, a majority of the population. This isn't just politics-as-usual. As far as the population the country's concerned, the opposition party still doesn't get it to the point that they're not even the opposition party! Well, Rand Paul appeared to be the opposition, and he had the guts and the courage to stand up and demand that they explain something to him. And not only is he alive to tell about it, he's not being called names.

He's a hero to people.

And here is some interesting analysis from Conor Friedersdorf:

In the Spring of 2011, I wrote a widely ignored article arguing that the Republican Party's presidential nominee would be hard pressed to successfully run to President Obama's right on national security, given his aggressive approach to counterterrorism and the country's war weariness, but that pushing back against Obama's War on Terror excesses would be good politics and policy: "Imagine a nominee who a) issued a biting, accurate take-down of security theater, and inflamed voter passions by becoming a demagogue on naked airport scanners and intrusive pat-downs; b) Insisted that Libya was an imprudent, unaffordable war that had nothing to do with American interests, and was illegally launched; c) Tore into Obama for asserting the power to assassinate American citizens in secret, hammering on the obvious imprudence and frightening potential for abuse; d) pointed out that we'd be a lot safer if we redirected money now spent on nation-building in Afghanistan to almost any halfway effective, achievable counter-terrorism measure); e) picked one or two of the most egregious civil liberties abuses going on and pinned them on Obama."

What I described sure resembles the approach that Rand Paul has taken. Amazingly, several Tea Party aligned senators now seem to be playing along. And most surprising of all? Rush Limbaugh, the demagogue most attuned to the rank-and-file, is now celebrating Senator Paul's approach. 

Rand Paul: Bring the Boys Back Home

Rand Paul went on CNN and suggested we accelerate our timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I used to be against any of this talk, I thought we should be talking about achieving victory.  Now, I realize that this is just unrealistic.  I don't think we've had a strategy for victory there for years nor will we.  We are just churning through troops in a war of attrition with no end in sight.  I'd be for staying if we had a plan for actually winning.  But we don't.  So we should stop wasting American lives and American treasure on Afghanistan.  Anyway, here is Rand Paul:

Leftist Glenn Greenwald Slams Rand Paul's Liberal Detractors

It's amazing how Rand Paul has been able to reach across party lines and get such support from people no other Republican could.  Check out Glenn Greenwald's piece in the Guardian:

Last week's 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan's confirmation as CIA director by GOP Sen. Rand Paul was one of the first - and, from the perspective of media attention, easily among the most effective -Congressional efforts to dramatize and oppose just how radical these Terrorism-justified powers have become. For the first time since the 9/11 attack, even lowly cable news shows were forced - by the Paul filibuster - to extensively discuss the government's extremist theories of power and to debate the need for checks and limits.

All of this put Democrats - who spent eight years flamboyantly pretending to be champions of due process and opponents of mass secrecy and executive power abuses - in a very uncomfortable position. The politician who took such a unique stand in defense of these principles was not merely a Republican but a leading member of its dreaded Tea Party wing, while the actor most responsible for the extremist theories of power being protested was their own beloved leader and his political party.

Some Democrats, to their credit, publicly supported Paul, including Sen. Ron Wyden, who went to the Senate floor to assist the filibuster. Sens. Jeff Merkley, Pat Leahy and (independent) Bernie Sanders all voted against Brennan's confirmation, citing many of the same concerns raised by Paul. Some prominent progressive commentators praised Paul's filibuster as well: on CNN, Van Jones - while vowing that "I love this president" - said "Sen. Rand Paul was a hero for civil liberties" and that "liberals and progressives should be ashamed."

But most Democratic Senators ran away as fast as possible from having anything to do with the debate: see here for the pitifully hilarious excuses they offered for not supporting the filibuster while claiming to support Paul's general cause. All of those Democratic Senators other than Merkley and Leahy (and Sanders) voted to confirm the torture-advocating, secrecy-loving, drone-embracing Brennan as CIA chief.

Meanwhile, a large bulk of the Democratic and liberal commentariat - led, as usual, by the highly-paid DNC spokesmen called "MSNBC hosts" and echoed, as usual, by various liberal blogs, which still amusingly fancy themselves as edgy and insurgent checks on political power rather than faithful servants to it - degraded all of the weighty issues raised by this episode by processing it through their stunted, trivial prism of partisan loyalty. They thus dutifully devoted themselves to reading from the only script they know: Democrats Good, GOP Bad.

To accomplish that, most avoided full-throated defenses of drones and the power of the president to secretly order US citizens executed without due process or transparency. They prefer to ignore the fact that the politician they most deeply admire is a devoted defender of those policies. After stumbling around for a few days in search of a tactic to convert this episode into an attack on the GOP and distract from Obama's extremism, they collectively settled on personalizing the conflict by focusing on Rand Paul's flaws as a person and a politician and, in particular, mocking his concerns as "paranoia" (that attack was echoed, among others, by the war-cheering Washington Post editorial page).

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In sum, virtually all of the claims made by these progressive commentators in opposition to Paul's filibuster are false. Moreover, last week's Senate drama, and the reaction to it by various factions, reveals several critical points about how US militarism and the secrecy that enables it are sustained. I was traveling last week on a speaking tour and thus watched all of it unfold without writing about it, so I want to highlight three key points from all of this, centered around myths propagated by Democrats to demean Paul's filibuster and the concerns raised by it:

John Fund: There is a lot of support for Rand Paul in 2016

Rand is certainly rising:

Much of the GOP establishment obviously resents Rand Paul's arrival on the national stage. Take John McCain, who tangled frequently with Rand's father, Ron Paul, when they both ran in the GOP primaries in 2008. A front-page photo in the New York Times captured him glowering as he happened to share an elevator with Rand Paul in the Capitol building last week. McCain told reporters that if the younger Paul "wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids."

But at the annual Club for Growth meeting here in Palm Beach, it wasn't kids in the audience who greeted Paul as a hero, giving him a standing ovation both before and after his talk last Friday. The Club for Growth is a group of sober-minded business owners and investors who have proved their political clout by helping elect tea-party-oriented senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Rand Paul himself.

Some Club members are already in Paul's corner for 2016. "He has broadened his appeal to include three issues that 75 percent of the American people agree with," says George Yeager, an investment counselor from New York. "He wants a balanced-budget amendment, term limits, and a questioning of mindless nation-building overseas."

Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who is now president of the Heritage Foundation, told Club members that he "couldn't think of a more dramatic contrast between some senators having dinner with President Obama on the same night last week that Rand Paul and his allies were making their courageous stand." In his view, "the balance of power in the Senate GOP caucus is shifting." He noted that key members of the Senate leadership, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Jerry Moran of Kansas, came to the Senate floor in support of Paul's effort. 

If Paul ran for president, he would no doubt be the underdog, given the Republican Party's post-Reagan penchant for nominating only establishment figures. But two consecutive presidential defeats have discredited the establishment in the eyes of many activists.

Mallory Factor, who runs a popular "Monday Meeting" of conservative activists in Charleston, S.C., had Paul speak to his group recently and reported that the response was very favorable. "He has a fresh appeal," Factor says. "And the mailing lists he inherits from his father's two campaigns are a huge fundraising and organizational head start" in South Carolina and other states that will vote early in the 2016 nominating process.

The reaction in other early-voting states is also favorable. "I don't think you can underestimate how big of a moment this was," conservative Iowa talk-radio host Steve Deace told Politico, speaking of Paul's filibuster. "If the Iowa caucuses were tomorrow, he would win in a landslide."

Even Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's 2008 presidential effort, told Politico that Paul could be a formidable candidate. "I can't tell you how many hours and meetings are devoted to discussing the candidate's vision in a campaign," said Schmidt. "Well, you wouldn't have to do that with him. . . . He's got the right combination of principles, oratory skills, smarts, and showmanship."

The Atlantic: How the Establishment Press Got Rand Paul Wrong

A great piece by Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic.  It's a very extensive piece so I suggest reading the whole thing.  Here are some key excerpts:

On a given issue, a journalist confronted with the libertarian position, like legalizing drugs, objects by pointing out the most extreme possible consequence: "So I could go buy heroin at the store?" Fair enough, except that there are no analogous challenges to the establishment positions. A candidate whose stance is that drugs must remain illegal is never asked, "So you're okay with imprisoning millions of people, empowering violent street gangs, destabilizing multiple foreign countries, militarizing municipal police forces, and still having ubiquitous drug use?"

Thanks to status quo bias, libertarians are labeled "crazy" and "kooky," even as the establishment makes historic blunders for which they are never pilloried and that many libertarians opposed.

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Following the Maddow interview, Paul's thoughts on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were covered more frequently and in more detail than his position on any other issue. Whole articles rehashed the controversy. Every long profile commented on it at length. And most people failed to recognize that the same treatment could be given to almost any politician, and especially a principled civil libertarian. A liberal who describes herself as a First Amendment absolutist? "Do you really think it should be legal for an old white man to call a little black girl 'nigger' on the street?" We've just gone through a bout of anti-Second Amendment rhetoric. The neoconservatives are fond of attacking Fourth Amendment champions by accusing them of having wanted to read Osama bin Laden his Miranda rights. Do I think the Fifth Amendment should've applied to Anwar al Awlaki? Indeed I do. There's doubtless a Fox News contributor ready to tell me that I favor coddling our terrorist enemy.

What almost no one in the establishment press realizes, even today, is that the qualities that impelled Paul to defend his wrongheaded discomfort with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the same stubbornness, political courage, and deeply felt commitment to libertarian principles that makes him willing to express the opinion that just because someone propagandizes for Islamists doesn't give us the right to kill them; or that even accused terrorists deserve due process; or that if you have a cousin in the Middle East who you talk to on the phone that shouldn't put you at risk of warrantless surveillance or a drone strike. Said Michael Scherer in Time, "The libertarian approach, which heavily favors private rights over government rights, has always produced some interesting conversations. Most libertarians, for instance, don't own a bong or watch extremely violent pornography, but Republican doctors like Ron Paul will defend your right to grow and smoke marijuana and avoid obscenity prosecutions for producing the most vile consensual smut. They see it as an issue of personal rights. Government should stay out of your lungs, they argue, stay out of your bedrooms, and stay out of your businesses."

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NPR would never harangue a candidate who supported a woman's right to choose an abortion in all circumstances about whether it would even be okay to terminate a pregnancy at 32 weeks just because the mother decided that she didn't want a girl. But I'm sure someone like Dennis Prager could adeptly craft a whole uncomfortable interview around that premise. And it's impossible to make the statement that torture is always wrong without someone chiming in about how immoral it would be to cling to that anti-torture position in a ticking time bomb scenario.

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Compare the reaction to Paul's comments on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to Michael Bloomberg's ongoing stop-and-frisk policy and the NYPD task force he sent to New Jersey to spy on innocent Muslim college students. I understand why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is regarded as sacrosanct, but treating non-racist, abstract discomfort with one of its provisions as a more important than actual, ongoing state harassment of innocent blacks and Muslims is bonkers. It isn't that no liberal has ever objected to Bloomberg's excesses, but tell me this: if pitted against one another in the 2016 presidential election, do you think the press would give Paul or Bloomberg a harder time on matters of race? What do you think would garner more mentions, the Civil Rights Act or spying on innocent Muslim students for months without producing any leads?

Greta Van Susteren: Rand Paul Has Dignity and Class and Many of His Critics Don't

Okay, she didn't actually say that John McCain and Lindsey Graham don't have dignity or class but that seems to be the implication in her blog post:

This posting is NOT whether you agree with Senator Rand Paul about drone policy…this is about good manners and decency.

Senator Rand Paul, as far as I recall, did NOT get personal or trash or insult anyone in his filibuster.  Instead Senator Paul passionately debated.  He also did not break any Senate rule but rather debated within the framework set forth by the Senate.

Can you say the same for his critics?  Did they passionately debate (and disagree) with him — or did they get personal and insulting?

Eleanor Clift: Rand Paul is Trying to Stir a Revolt Against the US Government

I guess questioning big government in a cordial, well researched speech is now "stirring revolt":