Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) spoke late Friday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was very similar to last year’s speech, which suggests one of the many problems with the speech is its generic praise of “liberty” and an other-worldly take on the government as our real enemy.
First, it was filled with rubbish. In going for a big applause line from a room of 20-somethings, Paul suggested that the NSA is listening to all our phone calls. This is false, and it is disturbing if he doesn’t understand the difference between metadata and the content of phone calls. The portrait of a government on the verge of tyranny might stir his father’s former fans, but it is quite divorced from what the NSA does and whether its program is constitutional.
Does Rand Paul really think the Constitution doesn’t allow enemy combatants to be held at Gitmo? Apparently so – and he thinks the poor detainees are like innocent minorities with whom we should commiserate: “Justice cannot occur without a trial,” he said. “That fact should be abundantly clear to any group that has ever been persecuted. You can be a minority by the color of your skin or the shade of your ideology. Anyone who has ever paddled upstream, anyone who has ever been [in the] minority of thought or religion, anyone who has ever taught their children at home or sought to pray to God without permission should be alarmed that any government might presume to imprison without trial.”
