Wednesday Open Thread [4.8.15]

The big names in the media yesterday all pretended like Rand Paul is some kind of libertarian. However, as Jason noted yesterday, not only has Rand Paul already backed away and flip flopped on positions that might have made him somewhat appealing as a libertarian or a New Republican (like his non-neocon isolationist foreign policy stances on Iran and the Middle East), there are other instances were Rand Paul is in no way a libertarian.

Here is the New York Times pretending that Rand Paul represents a new future for the GOP and a path back for the party to a national party that wins presidential elections again:

“Offering a conservative message threaded with a contrarian strain of libertarianism that he hopes will appeal to minority and younger voters, Mr. Paul is taking perhaps the most unconventional and untested route to assembling the broader coalition that many Republicans say they will need to remain a viable national party.”

Here is the Wall Street Journal noting that Paul “took more shots at the GOP” than at President Obama. That interesting. Perhaps that is the way he will compete for the Tea Party base that hates the Party Establishment as much as they do President Obama.

Here is the Washington Post:

“Paul’s appeal was rooted in part in the purist libertarian plank championed for decades by his father, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. But the senator also seeks to move beyond his father’s base by stitching together a nontraditional coalition among disparate blocs of voters who share frustration with the federal government’s role in their lives, whether evangelicals, tea party activists or tech-savvy millennials.”

The Catch-22 for Mr. Paul is the same for Mr. Bush as it was for Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain: to win the Republican nomination now forces you to take position and say things that make you absolutely toxic for the general electorate. So he has to discard the libertarian persona, what little he had of it.

Think Progress noted six major ways that Rand Paul is not a libertarian:

1. Rand Paul Opposes Abortion Rights, Sponsored Legislation That Would Make All Abortions Illegal
2. Rand Paul Opposes Marriage Equality, Finds It ‘Offensive’
3. Rand Paul Supports A Massive Increase In Defense Spending
4. Rand Paul Supports Extensive Use Of Drones At Home And Abroad
5. Rand Paul Opposes The Legalization Of Marijuana
6. Rand Paul Suggested Putting People In Prison For Listening To ‘Radical Political Speeches’

Rand Paul admitted it himself: “I’m not a libertarian.”

Nate Cohn: “The libertarians remain too young and too few to present Senator Paul with a realistic path to the nomination. He has to win over a much larger share of more reliable Republican primary voters, who will have considerable reservations about Mr. Paul’s policies. The other problem he faces: Many of the voters most receptive to libertarian views tend not to vote.”

“In one sense, you could argue that the libertarian wing of the Republican Party barely exists at all. According to a large Pew Research survey in 2014 of 10,000 respondents, 11 percent of Americans and 12 percent of self-identified Republicans considered themselves libertarian. They met a basic threshold for knowing what the term meant. But there wasn’t much ‘libertarian’ about these voters; over all, their views were startlingly similar to those of the public as a whole.”

Pew Research did some … well research into the political leanings of our country and guess what? We are a center left nation. Dare I say it? A liberal nation. Pew Research found that more demographic groups lean Democratic than Republican, and more Americans lean towards supporting Democrats.

Pew found that Republicans are just who they are often thought to be. Mormons (+48) and Evangelical Christians (+46) were the heaviest skewing Republican groups followed by white Southerners (+21), white men with some or no college education (+21), white voters (+9), and voters age 69-86 (+4).

So… old uneducated hicks. Got it.

The demographic groups that tilt Democratic include African Americans (+69), Asians (+42), religiously unaffiliated (+36), postgraduate women (+35), Jewish (+30), Hispanics (+30), Millennials (+16).

How about those vaunted Independents?

Most of those who identify as independents lean toward a party. And in many respects, partisan leaners have attitudes that are similar to those of partisans – they just prefer not to identify with a party. […]

The balance of leaned partisan affiliation has changed little in recent years: 48% identify with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, while 39% identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. Democrats have led in leaned party identification among the public for most of the past two decades.

J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward reminds us that “Benjamin Netanyahu” is Hebrew for “George W. Bush.”

In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.

Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.
Israeli leaders continued pooh-poohing Iraq all spring. Dismissal turned to alarm in August, when Iranian dissidents released evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. In September Sharon told his cabinet to stop discussing Iraq. It was annoying the White House.

On September 12, however, a different Israeli voice visited Washington: ex-prime minister-turned-private citizen Benjamin Netanyahu. A longtime Sharon rival, closely allied with Washington’s neoconservatives, he’d been invited to address the Republican-led House as an expert on Iraq. Baghdad, he said, was hiding mobile centrifuges “the size of washing machines.” Moreover, “if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” Throughout the Middle East, including Iran, populations will be inspired to topple their own dictators.
Bush, of course, listened to Netanyahu and the neocons, not Sharon and his generals. Alas, Sharon was right. Iraq imploded. Iran surged. The invasion had reverberations, but hardly positive. The rest is history.

So when Bibi makes his predictions now, punch him directly in the face and tell him to shut the fuck up.