The hardest part is saying sorry

I was going to lead in with The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ but another guy (and probably loads of others) beat me to it. Instead we’ll jump back to 1968, an era Rand Paul is taking heat for not properly remembering.

Firstly, Rand Paul is not a racist. He was asked, “Should Woolworth lunch counter have been allowed to stay segregated?” and Paul couldn’t bring himself to say ‘no’ for other reasons entirely. This does show an ideological extremism which will endanger his campaign, which even Dave Weigel called a ‘proper’ gaffe. To think, other self-described libertarians who were patting themselves on the back last Tuesday after hearing news of Paul’s victory, not realizing that perhaps libertarian ideology will get a truly public vetting outside the safety of college campus opinion sheets and NRA rallys. Ezra Klein wrote, “the hard part of Rand Paul’s vision of freedom is being on the wrong side of it. And that’s not the side that Paul — who is wealthy, educated and white — is on,” and that sums up most liberals frustrations with the libertarian movement, that libertarians can’t grasp the tarnished other side of the libertarian coin (backed by gold of course).

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