Fuck You, Rand Paul.
This is the first time in this essay that I have used the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul. There will be many more.
Because Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared with Donald Trump on Monday night at a rally to get out the vote for Republican Virginia Governor Matt Bevin – and you already know where this is going – and decided to impress his boss. He told the crowd, “We know the name of the whistleblower,” referring to the hitherto anonymous White House insider who first reported Viceroy Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine – and later told reporters, “I’m more than willing to (name the whistleblower) and I probably will at some point…There is no law preventing anybody from saying the name.”
So let me begin my remarks with the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul.
I say this because as at least one journalist pointed out, Rand Paul HAD said, in 2014, ““We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions”.
The Daily Beast reported on November 6: “Shortly after Sen. Paul tweeted out an article that speculated in considerable detail about the identity of the whistleblower—with a photograph, a name, and details about the purported political history of a CIA professional—Russian state media followed suit. As if on cue, the Kremlin-controlled heavy hitters—TASS, RT, Rossiya-1—disseminated the same information. But unlike Rand Paul, one of the Russian state media outlets didn’t seem to find the source—Real Clear Investigations—to be particularly impressive, and claimed falsely that the material was published originally by The Washington Post. “
According to Politico, within American media, “only a small cable TV channel supportive of the president and an ostensibly nonpartisan news site have each published the purported name of the whistleblower.”
So fuck you, #redpaul.
If I ever got one of those deep
interview shows like Bill Maher or Henry Rollins or Zach Galifinakis,
and I got the chance to interview Rand Paul, the first question I
would ask him is this:
Senator, at what point in the Trump
Administration did you decide that libertarianism equals kissing
Donald Trump’s ass?
That isn’t even the worst of it. Rand Paul has been a dillhole for reasons completely unrelated to Trump. Most conspicuously, just this July Rand Paul and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) put a procedural hold on a bipartisan bill to help cover the medical costs of 9-11 first responders on the grounds that it was adding to our growing deficit. Jon Stewart, who has spent much of his time since The Daily Show advocating for 9-11 firefighters in Congress, told journalists, “He is a guy that put us in hundreds of billions of dollars in debt…. And now he’s going to tell us that a billion dollars a year over 10 years is just too much for us to handle? You know, there are some things that they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community—the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors—all of a sudden, man, we’ve got to go through this.” In response, Paul referred to Stewart as “a scalawag and a ragamuffin.” (That’s another question I’d like to ask: ‘Senator Paul, on the scale of 19th Century insults, is ragamuffin a more or less insulting word than mountebank?’)
When I try to tell people that we’d be better off with a more libertarian approach to government, their usual reaction is that the premise of libertarianism is not freedom and tolerance for everyone, but “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine.” And you know why they think that? Because YOU, Rand Paul, the most prominent elected advocate of libertarianism, think this penny wise-pound foolish approach to spending is an example of fiscal responsibility.
You cut off that aid – knowing that you couldn’t do so for long but that every day you did hold it up would cost those men medical care – and THAT is the hill that you choose to fight for fiscal conservatism and saving money? When you don’t say Jack over squat about the fact that Trump is on track to rack up more money in taxpayer-funded golf trips in four years than President Obama did in eight?
Fuck you, Rand Paul.
It is time for the libertarian movement to admit that Rand Paul is to libertarians what Kanye West is to black people. Seriously, he’s just like Kanye West: all it takes is a big fat ass to change his mind.
Which gets to the other relevant subject.
As we know, incumbent Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin lost his race to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, son of the previous Governor. Which meant voters said not only Fuck You, Rand Paul, but (obviously) Fuck You Matt Bevin, Fuck You Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell, and especially FUCK YOU, DONALD TRUMP. And Bevin is of course trying to contest the results, likely by expecting the still-Republican held legislature to back him up, except that a lot of those Republicans are publicly trying to cool down such talk. And that might because while Bevin only trails Beshear by a little over 5,000 votes, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate John Hicks got 28,425 votes.
In response to the event, the official Facebook page of the Libertarian Party did this piece, most likely written by Nicholas Sarwark: https://www.facebook.com/LPKentucky/posts/10157252121401936
“In an ideal world, we elect Libertarian candidates and advance liberty. Failing that, we push mainstream candidates towards liberty to advance the cause.
But if we can’t do those things, we are always happy to split the vote in a way that causes delicious tears. Tonight there are plenty of delicious tears from Bevin supporters.
Had Matt Bevin not ditched his liberty Lt Governor for a Mitch McConnell picked anti liberty, corrupt running mate who has tried to eliminate Kentuckians jury trial rights, had Matt Bevin not presided over a huge sales tax increase, had Matt Bevin supported any of our key issues on criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, expanded gaming, cutting taxes, or acted with the least bit of civility, we probably would not have run a candidate. Of course, he did the opposite. And here we are.
We split the vote. And we could not be more thrilled. If our friends in the major parties do not want this to happen again, they should think about passing ranked choice voting. And supporting our issues.
In the meantime, thank you to John Hicks, Ann Cormican, Kyle Hugenberg, Josh Gilpin and Kyle Sweeney for running. Your effort was appreciated.
For the Bevin supporters, your tears are delicious.”
And the comments on said Facebook page were amusing to say the least. One guy said: “What a joke. Truly embarrassed to call myself a Libertarian. Way to push people back to the two party.” Response: “Libertarian Party of Kentucky Triston Myers we looked up your voter registration. Please do not claim to be a libertarian when you are a registered Republican. Thanks for playing.”
Which pretty much sums up the “conservative” pushback in that thread.
Let’s go over this. One of the other alleged sympathizers in the thread posted, “Making the statement that you find the tears of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians delicious shows that not only will your party never actually win an election, but that you the writer of the post are a poor excuse for a human! To relish in anyone’s pain is closer to fascism than democracy!” My response: “Yeah, I’m sure all those kids in the detention facilities will be glad to hear that conservatives don’t relish in anyone’s pain.” And another person posted: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”
“Well, I’m never supporting the libertarian movement again.”
Bitch, when did you EVER?
Did you vote for a Libertarian
candidate? No? Are you a member of the Libertarian Party? NO? Then
who cares what you think about the Libertarian Party? You have just
as much right to call yourself a libertarian as Bernie Sanders. Get
out of the city!
There’s a difference between a socialist who says “I vote Democratic because that’s the most practical option I have in the system” and a libertarian who says, “I vote Republican because that’s the most practical option I have in the system.” The socialists are actually moving the Democrats to socialism. The Republican Party is far less libertarian than it was even four years ago. And we know this because Rand Paul is far less libertarian than he was four years ago.
Oh by the way, fuck you, Rand Paul.
And fuck all y’all who think that the Republicans are libertarian or even the “lesser evil.” You’re the people who are making MY job harder.
You’re the people telling America, and the rest of the world, that a “small government” just means a government small enough to fit in your uterus. You don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. And by the same token, you don’t like gun control? Here’s a great way to discourage gun control AND prove you’re pro-life: Stop shooting so many people. Cause with the conspicuous exception of James Hodgkinson, most of the people who shoot up public places, mosques and synagogues aren’t fans of open borders and AOC.
You’re the people who make a fetish of tax cuts but let the Republicans pass a tax bill that primarily benefited their donors and cut state tax deductions in a lot of states. Like the man said, Governor Bevin refused to cut taxes in Virginia and passed a huge sales tax increase. And you’re accusing us of letting the pro-tax party win? I assume that you’re the anti-tax party? Prove it.
You’re the people who want us to get out of foreign entanglements but cheer while Trump betrays the Kurds one week then next week resettles our troops in north Iraq and Saudi Arabia to get everybody’s oil.
The libertarian Republican has a fat Venn overlap with the Good Christian(TM)Republican: they both profess to a philosophy that holds a higher value than the state but give greater power and authority to the state over the individual every chance they get, and never more so than under this Republican president. For example, Rand Paul.
On a related subject, fuck you, Rand Paul.
When you say, “I’m a libertarian, and I love Trump”, it’s like saying “I’m an Orthodox Jew, and I love bacon cheeseburgers.” Clearly, one priority outweighs the other.
And if you’re going to badmouth libertarians because we don’t worship Trump and don’t agree with you on abortion, or your endorsement of Republican policies that lead to less liberty and civil rights, don’t tell us that we’re letting the bad guys win. Our priorities are not yours, and when you tell the rest of the world they are, you do more to undermine the Right and give the Left a victory that they could not have achieved with their own limited imaginations and strategy.
Why, it’s ALMOST AS IF the Republican Party had been taken over as a long-term project from an ex-KGB chief to undermine the primary opponent to Russian hegemony and make the left spectrum of politics look more attractive in comparison.
And don’t whine at us cause we took votes you didn’t deserve. Cause I distinctly remember one Trumpnik friend whining after the election even though his team won.
“Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”
And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”
You know how I could say that? Because years before Trump, there were close state elections in Nevada where the Democrat won by less points than the Libertarian vote, and I heard Republicans howl like scalded cats for losing votes that they wrongly took for granted, just as the Democrats whined in 2016. And I knew that if the tables were turned and Republicans again lost a race by the third-party margin, Republicans would howl just as loud as the Clintonistas did in 2016. And wow, wouldn’t ya know, I was right.
I know that libertarians aren’t good at appealing to the center and quite a few of us take a delight in scaring the straights. Starchild. That guy who took colloidal silver and turned his skin blue. And of course, Nicholas Sarwark. But none of those guys want to separate migrant families and put them in cages. And contrary to liberal belief, the government hasn’t been run by Milton Friedman nerds for the past three years. Because the first thing those people would have told Trump is, tariff wars never work.
Now I know that liberals and conservatives might think that people like me and Nicholas Sarwark are flippant and “glibertarian,” but really, we’re just trying to make you grow the fuck up. Both “real” parties assume that the worst thing in the world would be the other party taking charge. And face it: you both have good reason to think so. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin and other states by less than the margin of Gary Johnson’s votes, and liberals wailed that the theo-fascists would take over Washington. And so they did. And this week, the “conservatives” are wailing that because of John Hicks, the socialists and gun-grabbers and baby-killers will take over in Kentucky. And they will.
Here’s the joke, neither one of your parties deserves to win, but as long as you insist that we can only vote for the two of you, one of you WILL win any given election. So the punch line is that one of you was going to win this election, and one of you was going to lose. And if Libertarians ARE an unpopular outlier, if Matt Bevin did win the last time, and he didn’t win this time, that means at least one of three things: Libertarians got more votes than last time, Democrats got more votes than last time, or fewer people voted Republican than last time. Quite likely all of the above.
Which is exactly what happened to Republicans in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against President Obama and what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It would have happened whether Libertarians and Greens were in the race at all. So I’m not exactly shaking in my boots at all you whiners who say you’re leaving the libertarian movement because we’re not “conservative” enough for you. The reason Bevin lost is because a lot more people who used to vote Republican are leaving YOUR party, and you will continue to lose elections this way until you run out of elections to lose.
Apropos of nothing, fuck you, Rand Paul.
The fact is, Libertarians ARE the common-sense middle. Republicans think that Democrats want to turn America into a socialist nanny state. Democrats think that Republicans want to turn America into a corporatist banana republic. Libertarians think they’re both right.
At some point, the “greater evil” is going to win an election, unless one party succeeds at turning America into a one-party banana republic. And if it seems like me, and a lot of the Libertarians on Tuesday night, seem to be sliding towards the Democrats, it’s only because the Republicans are far more likely to desire that outcome. To paraphrase David Frum: If democracy interferes with the conservatives’ agenda, they will not modify conservatism, they will abandon democracy. But in the meantime, Democrats are going to win elections, just as Republicans were killing Democrats (figuratively) until everybody saw how incompetent they were. Is this the end of the world? Cause it’s happened a lot. I think back to that guy in the forum who said: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”
Because after all, we are Libertarians. We have survived the end of the world more times than you can count. So in between these races, we have to live our lives as though the world didn’t end.
In fact, I would say that’s one implicit point of the libertarian movement: the idea that politics, conquest and domination are not the be-all and end-all of existence.
Because as we have seen, there are worse things in the world than losing. You could proverbially win the whole world by selling your soul. You could seize power by hook or by crook (emphasis on the crook) and once in charge become such insufferable, cretinous goons that the rest of the country got over how much they hated Those Other Guys and voted for them to flush you out because they hate you that much more. And so the “worst thing in the world happens” because you practically begged for it.
And that’s what happens when you confuse libertarianism, small government and small-r republicanism with the anti-liberty, Big Government and anti-republican agenda of the personality cult that is currently animating the shell of the Republican Party like a pack of rats inside a week-old corpse.
In conclusion, if you the reader remember only four words from this essay, I want them to be these:
Fuck You, Rand Paul.