The 2016 Clown Car Clock Strikes Thirteen

The Hill identifies the baker's dozen of GOP goofballs potentially running for the White House in 2016, and these thirteen are a solid wall of losers each with their own problems that will prevent them from ever winning.

The current driver is Rand Paul:

Paul would not have been in the top tier just a few months ago, but since then he’s become a media sensation. He’s as comfortable bashing the president for his immigration executive actions on Fox News as he is joking about pot with Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time.”

In addition to inheriting his father’s campaign infrastructure, he’s moved early and aggressively to build his own from Silicon Valley to Washington.

Paul’s Libertarian streak could appeal to young voters who have tilted Democratic in recent years. And out of the top tier of establishment contenders, he has the best chance of winning the Iowa caucuses, which would make him the unquestioned frontrunner.

There's a lot of push to make Paul the libertarian version of Dubya's "compassionate conservative", where compassion is replaced by "profit margin".  For the voters who believe that everyone would be a millionaire except for those pesky government regulations and that those people just need to work 95 hours a week if they really wanted to not be poor, Paul is their man.  Bonus points for his forays into the dark urban jungle to visit the natives there to show people he cares about black and Latino voters. 

I think that's what bothers me the most about Rand Paul, that to him, voters of color are noble but ignorant savages that simply need to be educated on the wonders of Randian capitalism, like the calendar reads 1732 and Detroit is the heart of the new Dark Continent.  If we were only shown the enlightenment of Republican conservatism, we'd instantly leave behind the "Democrat plantation" forever.

That's the basis of Rand Paul's minority outreach.  Black and Latino voters are too stupid to see the truth and need to be educated by any means necessary.  It's really not too different from the days of African Colonialism or the British Raj, only it's the police doing the dirty work.  When we talk about the "modern apartheid state" here in America, it's not terribly far from the truth.

And Rand Paul is the guy packaging all that in a guilt-free wrapper for a lot of Republican voters (and more than a few young white Democratic voters too).

Of the thirteen the Hill lists, Rand Paul is by far the most dangerous.