Still standing with Rand
February 14, 2016It’s no secret that I backed Rand Paul’s presidential campaign (both here and financially). So naturally I was disappointed when he decided to end his campaign last week while I was traveling for business.
Not that I need another reason to despise Donald Trump, but I’ll add this one to the pile anyway. Thanks, Donald.
I think Nick Gillespie nails in it in this column, and that includes the parts about Rand trying to pass himself off as a conservative. Gillespie writes:
The short version of what went wrong is neither complicated nor difficult to explain.
Donald Trump happened, bending virtually all the light to him like a black hole for most of the past six months or more. […]
His [Rand’s] campaign was lackluster at times or, even worse, a conservative repudiation of the “libertarian-ish” tendencies that had earned him sobriquets such as “the most interesting man in the Senate” and “the most interesting man in politics.”
The guy whose 13-hour filibuster forced President Obama to promise not to drone-kill American citizens drinking coffee at Starbucks and who said the GOP needed to be “white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with pony tails, without pony tails, with beards, without” rarely hesitated to jump on the anti-Planned Parenthood and anti-Syrian refugee bandwagons along with all the other GOP candidates.
I don’t regard a conservative as someone who necessarily wants to conserve liberty. Some want to conserve American political heritage; others just want to conserve their idea of a “good social order.” I’m with the first; the others can take a hike.
That’s why I talk, write, and vote libertarian: I don’t trust conservatives (as a group) to maintain liberty in any consistent, principled sense. And I was disappointed when Rand jumped on the very bandwagons that Gillespie mentions.
But to paraphrase an old saying in the software business: good marketing beats good principles any day.
All that said, I still think Rand was the best choice for those of us who want liberty to be conserved and expanded. So I liked Rand’s farewell video last week.
No Truce With Kings 
[…] I don’t consider myself a Republican, so I haven’t written much about how Donald Trump has managed to piss all over the Republican primary process this year. (That is, aside from mentioning how he torpedoed Rand Paul’s chances.) […]