Molehill becomes a mountain
Rand Paul is a rising star in the Republican Party. The Pittsburgh native and junior U.S. Senator from Kentucky has been on the cutting edge of Republican foot-dragging since he was sworn-in on Jan. 5, 2011.
Unlike the flamboyant, filibuster-happy Senator from Texas — Ted Cruz — when Rand Paul decides to throw a monkey wrench into Senate proceedings, serious people listen. The man loves to talk.
Back in March, he spent nearly 13 hours talking non-stop during a filibuster designed to halt the nomination of John Brennan as the Obama administration’s selection for CIA Director. Paul had a serious question about the military use of drones. So he droned on until Attorney General Eric Holder answered his question to his liking. Drones, according to Holder, can’t be used by the president to mete out punishment against non-combatants. The filibuster ended. Brennan was quickly confirmed, and Paul was given universally high marks, if only for his pluck.
But he does have a tendency to talk too much. Back when he was campaigning for the Senate in May of 2010, he appeared on MSNBC in an interview with host Rachel Maddow. The subject somehow got around to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Paul claimed he agreed with all of it, except Title II, which makes it a crime for a private business to discriminate against its customers on the basis of race. He told Maddow, if he’d been in Congress back then, he would have worked to change the bill.
“Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?” he asked.
Eyebrows all over America were raised by that.
Consequently, the following day, Paul backed away from his excursion into civil rights law, and he blamed Maddow for his indelicate statements.
Going on her show, according to him, was “a poor political decision and probably won’t be happening anytime in the near future,” he said in a radio interview. Paul hasn’t returned to Maddow’s show. But Maddow has taken an interest in Paul’s penchant for over-speak.
On Oct. 28, while Paul was speaking at Liberty University in Virginia in support of gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, he curiously wandered into the subject of abortion rights and eugenics.
Paul claimed that in the future the use of genetics can be used so that undesirable physical traits can be detected in embryos and fetuses, so that abortion can be used as a solution.
According to Paul, “In the not-too-distant future, eugenics is common and DNA plays a primary role in determining your social class.”
Paul admitted he’d borrowed the idea from the little-known 1997 science fiction movie, “Gattaca.” Enter Maddow.
She reported that much of Paul’s speech that day didn’t come from the movie but from a synopsis of it on the online website, Wikipedia.
That, in fact, is considered plagiarism, or as Maddow put it, he “ripped-off” whole sections of it. Paul’s response was that Maddow is a “hater,” and that, while he referenced the movie, his failure to mention Wikipedia as the real source of his statements was a “disagreement on how you footnote things.”
But soon, there were eager fact-checkers springing from the woodwork, and they found even more examples of Paul’s inclinations to openly steal the words of others.
Paul’s book “Government Bullies,” according to Buzzfeed, contains a three-page passage taken directly from an article written by a conservative think tank in 2004.
At one point, Paul, who’s known for having a way with words, seemed to indicate he’d rather shoot than speak. “If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, it’d be a duel challenge,” he said on a Sunday talk show. But before he could load his musket, the Washington Times, where Paul writes a weekly column, fired (him) first.
It’s been revealed that a column he wrote for that newspaper on minimum sentencing in September was freely borrowed from another column that was written by another writer a week earlier. The Washington Times won’t be needing Paul’s services any longer.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net