Rand Paul’s tiresome shtick: The “liberal media” didn’t make you say a lot of dumb things

Angry Rand Paul is once again blaming the liberal media for highlighting his worst quotes. Sorry, this doesn't fly

JIM NEWELL

The fight for the 2016 Republican nomination is going to be so fun. (“Fun”). A brief sequence of the past few days: On Sunday everyone watched the Super Bowl and Katy Perry and Missy Elliott and it was great. On Monday morning Chris Christie was playing defense for suggesting vaccinations shouldn’t be mandatory, they should be up to the parents. By Monday night Rand Paul was shushing a woman, on television, and by Tuesday afternoon, curtain:

Senator Rand Paul ✔ @SenRandPaul
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Ironic: Today I am getting my booster vaccine. Wonder how the liberal media will misreport this?
5:30 PM - 3 Feb 2015

Not quite as much skin as Don Lemon, God bless. This is a pinned tweet on Rand Paul’s feed. It follows several other tweets suggesting that Rand Paul loves vaccinations, gets ‘em all the time, and anyone who suggests otherwise merely has it out for him. (It’s also a total dodge on the question of whether vaccinations should be mandatory.) He’s so mad.

Now there are members of the media who merely have it out for him. But they’re not in the liberal media. One of the things that sucks about being Rand Paul, relative to the rest of the Republican field, is that neoconservative media — the Washington Free Beacon, the Weekly Standard, Jennifer Rubin’s blog at the Washington Post — are hellbent on doing whatever they can to discredit his presidential hopes. They don’t appreciate his hesitancy towards invading every country on Earth, and so they’re more than willing to peddle whatever intra-party opposition research they can on Paul. If it had been, say, Marco Rubio, or one of the other over-the-top war hawk candidates arguing that mandatory vaccinations are the first step towards “martial law,” the Washington Free Beacon would have praised the Florida senator for his trenchant insights into political theory.

But it wasn’t Marco Rubio who said that. It was Rand Paul. And he said it on the radio show of performance-art conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2009. Rand Paul has said a lot of kooky things in his political career, one that draws its strength from his father’s fringy base of support. It’s understandable that he would get frustrated when people bring up these quotes while he’s trying to “pivot” to more of a mainstream commodity. It’s frustrating when you’ve said a lot of crazy nonsense and people mention them

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http://www.salon.com/2015/02/05/rand_pauls_tiresome_schtick_the_liberal_media_didnt_make_you_say_a_lot_of_dumb_things/