Rand Paul, the quintessential tea party candidate

So, Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky, is ready to fight the good fight to "take our country back." Take our country back from whom, I wonder?

He celebrated his victory in the primary at an exclusive country club where most of his prospective Kentucky constituents would not be welcome. It would appear that he wants to take the country back and give it to the country club set that he "pals around" with, to coin a phrase.

On Rachel Maddow's show last night, he professed to be leery of parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so I guess he wants to take the country back from folks who are covered by those acts. He doesn't think that private business owners, WHO OFFER SERVICES TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC, should be forbidden from discriminating against someone because of race, creed, color, national origin, sex, or gender. He also apparently does not believe that businesses, WHO OFFER SERVICES TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC, should have to make provision to provide those services to persons with disabilities. He believes, essentially, that private business owners should be able to run their businesses anyway they want to and to choose whom they will and will not serve. In other words, Jim Crow is okay.

This is not just something that he came up with last night in answer to questions from Maddow. He has expressed such views repeatedly over the years, and apparently they were fairly well known in Kentucky. Of course, a state that elected the wackadoodle Jim Bunning to the Senate might feel that Paul is a worthy successor!

Now that his views have been expressed in the open forum of Maddow's show and have become public fodder for pundits to chew on, certain Republicans are trying to distance themselves from him or to pretend that they haven't heard what he said and so can't comment on it. And now that Paul sees what he has wrought, he's trying to walk back from the blatancy of his oft-expressed opinions. But this quintessential tea party candidate has now revealed his true colors for all to see. If the world of journalism does its job and holds his feet to the fire, it should be very hard for him to repudiate what he has so clearly said.

Well, it COULD happen.

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