Posted on 11/08/2013 1:46:47 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Sen. Rand Paul was supposed to be a more politically savvy version of his father, former Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul.
The senior Paul energized a subset of the Republican Party, but the younger Paul was supposed to be a more mainstream advocate for limited government and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
The Kentucky senator has even been touted as one of the leading candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Yet time and again, he has shown why he shouldn't be taken seriously.
The latest controversy surrounding Paul, which has been detailed in a series of stories at BuzzFeed by Andrew Kaczynski, involves a pattern of plagiarism in which he has cut and pasted large sections of his writings from other sources without proper attribution.
Instead of simply owning up to it, Paul lashed out at the media: “I'm being criticized for not having proper attribution, and yet they are able to write stuff that if I were their journalism teacher in college, I would fail them,” Paul told National Review's Robert Costa.
Paul's dismissive tone recalls another incident earlier this year when it was revealed that a staffer who had helped write one of his books had a long history of pro-confederate sympathies.
I have no doubt that his core supporters will stick with Paul through his plagiarism scandal, just as his father Ron's passionate fans stuck with him, despite a troubling history of publishing racist newsletters and a tendency to make outrageous statements and claims.
But to win the nomination in 2016, Rand Paul has to expand his appeal beyond this core group. He won't be able to accomplish that if he continues to behave like an amateur.
Dec 22, 2011 - RedState: About Those Racist Ron Paul Newsletters that He Didn’t Read and Completely Disavowed ".....What I did not know until just today is that when these original allegations came to light back during Ron Paul’s 1996 Congressional run, his defense was absolutely not that he didn’t write them or know what was in them; his defense was that he was being taken out of context. He defended the comments on their merits. His campaign spokesman literally said that the problem was that the media was too intellectual to understand them. Yes, well, admittedly some people miss the intellectual nuance in statements like “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be” (a statement which Paul specifically defended when questioned by the media).
Now comes this: in 1995 CSPAN did an interview with then-former Congressman Ron Paul, asking what he’d been doing with his time. One of the questions that came up was, essentially whether he was still involved in politics. Paul’s answer? “Oh, yeah, I’ve got this great newsletter, let me tell you about it…”....
[SNIP]
You know, for not reading the newspaper and not having any inkling about what was in it, Paul was remarkably well informed as to its contents and general thrust.......
Crash! Bang! Boom!
Well at least Rand didn’t have someone else write his two auto-biographies.
Paul's dismissive tone recalls another incident earlier this year when it was revealed that a staffer who had helped write one of his books had a long history of pro-confederate sympathies.
They say that like it’s a bad thing. I’ll take a confederate over a communist any day.
But as we’ve learned, “we” have to be more careful about everything than “Them.”
Excellent Roxette song!
You would think that they would notice their declining ratings and declining subscription rates but it seems totally escape them that the two might be related.
Pro-confederate = pro limited goverment, in general. I'll take them over Demo or GOP-e any day.
The apple doesn’t fall far, he’ll never be “ready for prime time”.
Someone is afraid of Rand so they are trying to discredit him early on. I suspect it’s Christie who sees Paul as a threat, but I have nothing to go on other than a hunch.
Paul can be an asset in the coming battle but not as a candidate. He will never be pres or even the nom. He inherited his daddy’s mail list and that’s about it.
But to his credit he has been a help to the conservative movemnt in several ways but he may have over stayed his welcome...time will tell.
I’m not sure that I agree with that. He can articulate conservatism better than anyone, including Cruz who, though brilliant, has a manner that hurts him. But it matters not what we believe at this stage. We have a long way to go.
Rand Paul was never going to be ‘my’ guy. But if RP wants to be taken serious, he needs to formulate his ideas/concepts w/ his own words. He can’t be ‘lifting’ whole portions of other people’s work and then say they are his ideas.
RP is now in the situation where anything he has ever written or said is being put under the microscope to see if he used other people’s words and called them his own.
This is not about having a ghost writer/speech writer, IMO, this is about how YOU think...what is YOUR vision. I don’t need words from Wiki or some ‘think tank’. I want to know what you think because that tells me what kind of man you are and if you’ll get MY vote.
So true. This is a tempest in a teapot. The smearing of Rand Paul begins. Get a grip people or we will all be looking at Crispy Kreme in 2016 and wondering how we got Mitted again.
*See Barack Obama's speech entitled "If You Like Your Health Insurance You Can Keep It"
Perhaps he should have said/wrote he was quoting...but he didn’t. This is appears to be a pattern of Rand Paul. He uses other people words as his own...as in not saying, “and I quote Heritage”....
Look I get that some of what RP says are ‘good’ things. (and some not so great, imo). But really, how tough is it to come up w/ your own words/thoughts?
And sorry...but I hold my pol’s to a higher standard than to say well so and so does it. Goes back to that old thing my parents use to ask me...”if all your friends jump off the I5 bridge...are you just going to follow”?
Leaders lead. RP is not acting like a leader. IMO.
” I’ll take a confederate over a communist any day.”
D@mn straight. Even a flat-out moonshine-swilling “dem evil yankees” redneck of a confederate has this merit: he or she only hates about a third of the United States.
Even the mildest communist hates ALL of it and wants it plowed under and replaced with something out of a nightmare. That is one HELL of a difference, folks.
And quite frankly with the wild proliferation of 1st amendment strangling libtard PC nonsense, I’m slightly disappointed that conservatives are still hyperventilating over a few musty old letters that Paul may or may not have written, whose ‘racist’ content is positively weaksauce.
Yep.
Cruz takes almost the opposite approach and quickly points out that he’s not perfect when called on something, legitimate or not.
We need candidates with actual executive experience....Senators don’t cut it. You need governors...and as much as I like Cruz, he’d be in much better shape if he actually were a Governor.
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