J.E. Dyer at Hot Air takes both left and right to task for their expressions of horror at Rand Paul's heresies. As Dyer observes, in this shameful episode Paul is the only one who seems willing to actually think. Everyone else is rending their garments as though it's perfectly obvious that he has uttered blasphemy, but this seems like a tactic designed to enable them to avoid having to address his main point.
Dyer explains:
There have been two incidents now, since the Kentucky primary, in which Rand Paul has failed to prostrate himself automatically before a political shibboleth. One concerned the Civil Rights Act, the intent of which Paul has expressed full support for. His quarrel is with the element of the Civil Rights Act that authorizes the federal government to regulate private businesses.
The other is Paul's criticism of Obama's "boot on the neck" comment about BP, and of the general societal attitude in the US that everything must be litigated and litigable fault assigned for any bad thing that happens.
As Dyer argues regarding the civil rights matter, just because the federal government is acting to bring about some good doesn't mean that it's right that the federal government is doing it. It may be good that students not adopt Marxist economic ideas, for instance, but it would not be appropriate for the federal government to ban the dissemination of those ideas.
Dyer closes with this:
Tacit, unexamined acceptance of federal authority to do these things is what Rand Paul is challenging. In 2010, he is the one asking people to think, rather than to merely repeat doctrinaire talking points taught to them since birth. His critics, on the other hand, sound like nothing so much as children reciting a catechism, and tsk-tsk-ing over those who don't recite it in exactly the same way. That includes many of his critics on the right - who have agreed to be governed by a list of pieties that makes effective dissent from the left's religious doctrine impossible.
Read the whole piece at the link.
RLC
