Vanguard101
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- Aug 24, 2011
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Win or lose—and there’s no question he’s running—Rand Paul has firmly established himself as the most intriguing Republican eyeing the White House in 2016.
Thursday brought fresh evidence as the Kentucky senator leaped headlong into the racial cauldron that is Ferguson, Mo., with a bluntly stated Time magazine essay on the police shooting of Michael Brown. Weighing in was hardly a surprise; there are flies circling honey pots with more restraint than a politician given a chance to hold forth on the issue of the day.
Rather, what was striking was the angry tone and underlying sympathies of Paul’s essay, a condemnation of the “rising militarization of law enforcement” in the country and assertion that equal justice under law is more a pleasing bromide than reality on the streets of 2014 America.
“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” Paul wrote. “Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”
Paul’s rhetoric is not just a break with others in the embryonic Republican presidential field; it challenges GOP political orthodoxy going back several decades, ever since Richard Nixon made law and order a cudgel to batter Democrats in the riot-torn 1968 campaign. The strategy may have reached its apogee—or nadir—20 years later, when the elder George
Bush won the White House in part due to fears summoned by the lurid visage of black convict Willie Horton, used as a symbol of Michael Dukakis’ woolly headed liberalism.
Continued: http://www.latimes.com/nation/polit...-rand-paul-ferguson-riots-20140814-story.html
#RealMVP
Thursday brought fresh evidence as the Kentucky senator leaped headlong into the racial cauldron that is Ferguson, Mo., with a bluntly stated Time magazine essay on the police shooting of Michael Brown. Weighing in was hardly a surprise; there are flies circling honey pots with more restraint than a politician given a chance to hold forth on the issue of the day.
Rather, what was striking was the angry tone and underlying sympathies of Paul’s essay, a condemnation of the “rising militarization of law enforcement” in the country and assertion that equal justice under law is more a pleasing bromide than reality on the streets of 2014 America.
“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” Paul wrote. “Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”
Paul’s rhetoric is not just a break with others in the embryonic Republican presidential field; it challenges GOP political orthodoxy going back several decades, ever since Richard Nixon made law and order a cudgel to batter Democrats in the riot-torn 1968 campaign. The strategy may have reached its apogee—or nadir—20 years later, when the elder George
Bush won the White House in part due to fears summoned by the lurid visage of black convict Willie Horton, used as a symbol of Michael Dukakis’ woolly headed liberalism.
Continued: http://www.latimes.com/nation/polit...-rand-paul-ferguson-riots-20140814-story.html
#RealMVP
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