Sen. Rand Paul is a libertarian in the way that Gov. Walker is a free-market man: they prefer the titles, but act in ways contrary to the underlying principles. For Wisconsin, no man behind the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation & Foxconn project could genuinely support free markets in capital, labor, and goods; for Kentucky, no man who advocates détente with Putin’s Russia could genuinely support either peace or liberty.
One reads that Senator Rand Paul invites Russian lawmakers to Washington:
MOSCOW (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Rand Paul on Monday invited Russian lawmakers to visit Washington after holding talks in Moscow with parliamentarians and pledging to obstruct new sanctions against Russia.
The Republican senator and ally of U.S. President Donald Trump said he had traveled to the Russian capital to encourage diplomacy amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington.
U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to try to tilt the race in Trump’s favor, an assertion Moscow rejects, and the two countries are also at odds over Syria and Ukraine.
There is tension in the American relationship with Putin’s Russia because Putin seized Crimea, foments war in eastern Ukraine, threatens NATO allies in the Baltics and elsewhere, interfered in the last presidential election and looks set to do so in congressional elections this fall, bolsters a dictator in Syria, murders expatriate Russians in other nations, and murders and oppresses his own people at home.
Rand Paul will not bring peace by appeasing a murderous anti-American dictator. It’s a common Russian (and was formerly a Soviet) trick to claim that if one resists Russian ambitions, all the world will crumble. In fact, the world comes closer to crumbling when one does what Russia wants than when the democratic world resists Russian encroachments.
Those of us from old libertarian families have never been much taken with Rand Paul, or his bigoted father. (If anything, we’ve done a poor job of explaining how far we are from the Pauls’ views or Walker’s corporate welfare.)
In any event, there is no one truly libertarian who was, is, or ever will be (as Reuters accurately describes Sen. Paul), an “ally of U.S. President Donald Trump.”
Rand Paul is an interesting person. He appears to be more of a crypto-Trumper than a Libertarian. He is fond of taking “principled” stands against Trump’s excesses and then, inevitably, folding and supporting them anyway.
He is certainly in the category of Libertarian poseur, and I can see why actual Libertarians are uncomfortable around him.. Perhaps having been named after the author of a dystopian fantasy novel has addled him.
His current romance with the Russians is hard to understand. The timing of it is politically awful. To have a set of reciprocal garden-parties with the Russians in the middle of them being proven, without doubt, to have thrown the last US election is incomprehensible. Do they have a pee-tape of him, or something??
I agree, all around. His erratic moves (always, as you say, ending in capitulation) are bad enough; his pro-Russia stance makes no sense at all, either politically (a dead end) or morally (for obvious & numerous reasons a gangster state’s not worth defending). Yet here he is, disgracing and abasing himself time and again.
Kentucky, and America, would be better off if he were to return to private life.