Rand Paul Runs Like A Kentucky Race Moose

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi plus Sarah Palin plus Rand Paul equals an eureka moment here in the Bluegrass State.

"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

Nobody, and I mean nobody has mastered the art of convincing voters to vote against their own self-interests like the Tea Party.   All these elderly folks here in Bourbon country are convinced of one thing:  they want theirs, and that means taking it away from everyone except them.  When these folks agree we need to cut spending and reform entitlements, that means for everyone else in the country.  The Republicans wouldn't dare touch their government checks.  They'll take stuff away from "them" instead.

Keep thinking that, Kentucky seniors.

In Conway's new ad targeting right-wing ophthalmologist Rand Paul (R), the Democratic campaign reminds voters of Paul's approach to seniors' care: "The real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible."

Not like Social Security checks will cover that, especially in a state like Kentucky, one of the nation's poorest. But Kentucky Tea Partiers figure that Rand Paul won't really make them pay $2,000 deductible on Medicare. Only "they" will be made to pay.

(More after the jump...)


It's not hard to imagine who "they" are, too.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over — as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

And Taibbi's pretty much correct.  This is the Tea Party I see every day, the people I live next to, that I see daily.  In reality they are hard-working folks who got screwed over badly.  They're looking for someone to blame.  The media sources they listen to, FOX news and talk radio, tell them that the reason your standard of living has gone to crap in the last ten years is because as a white person in America, you're now an oppressed minority.  Even the President is black now.

So this inchoate rage lays like a bar of steel across their hearts, and the GOP is completely exploiting it.  they are shamelessly, cynically, absolutely exploiting the oldest political trick in the book:  misery loves company.  This is all-new territory for Kentucky, arguably one of the whitest political states in the nation.  Black politicians don't get elected here ever, let alone Asian, Latino, or anyone else.  A black President has completely opened the trap door out from under them.  They've never, ever had to deal with it.

So yes, that's why Obama lost by 20 points here to McCain in 2008.  He's President anyway, and that's got them stunned.

Enter Rand Paul, somebody so thoroughly assimilated into the GOP's economic agenda that he doesn't care about the issues.  he's turning out to be more of an establishment Republican than Trey Grayson ever was...and the Tea Party doesn't care.

Paul's libertarian coming-out party was such a catastrophe — the three gaffes came within days of each other — that he immediately jumped into the protective arms of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party. "I think he's said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage," McConnell said, explaining why Paul had been prevailed upon by the party to cancel an appearance on Meet the Press. Some news outlets reported that Paul canceled the appearance after a call from Karl Rove to Adams, who concedes that he did speak with Rove around that time.

Soon after, McConnell threw yet another "Bailout Ball" fundraiser in Washington — only this time it was for Rand Paul. The candidate who just a year before had pledged not to accept money from TARP supporters was now romping in bed with those same politicians. When pressed for an explanation of Paul's about-face on the bailouts, Adams offers an incredibly frank admission. "When he said he would not take money from people who voted for the bank bailout, he also said, in the same breath, that our first phone call after the primary would be to Senator Mitch McConnell," says Adams. "Making fun of the Bailout Ball was just for the primary."

The Tea Party is just the Republican party 2.0 and always has been, the "I got mine, now screw the rest of you" crew, and nowhere is this more evident than Rand Paul and the Tea Party here in the NKY.  Let's not forget Joe Gerth's piece yesterday on the political aims of the doctor's group that Rand Paul belongs to.

The Louisville Courier-Journal reports that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul belongs to a professional organization - billed as a conservative alternative to the American Medical Association – that holds some questionable medical views, including that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, abortion increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer, President Barack Obama hypnotized voters in 2008, and that “there is no settled science on anything”.

Read both pieces.  If you're a Kentucky voter, that goes doubly so.