Ezra Klein is too eager to accept Rand Paul on his word that the Senatorial candidate is not racist:
It’s safe to say Rand Paul’s first few days as the Republican nominee for the open Senate seat in Kentucky are not going well. When you can’t answer the question “Should [the] Woolworth lunch counter have been allowed to stay segregated? Sir, just yes or no,” it’s fair to say you’re off-message.
Over at Right Now, Dave Weigel offers up the generous and, I think, correct interpretation of Paul’s opposition to the parts of the Civil Rights Act that desegregated private businesses. “Paul believes, as many conservatives believe, that the government should ban bias in all of its institutions but cannot intervene in the policies of private businesses.” And Weigel is right that this is not an unknown belief among conservatives: I’ve had this argument with some of my libertarian friends, and libertarians occasionally have this argument among one another.
So I take Paul at his word that he’s not a racist. What he is, however, is an ideological extremist. He is so categorically opposed to public regulation of private enterprise that he cannot even bring himself to say that the Woolworth lunch counter should’ve been desegregated. Instead, he falls back on the remedies of the market: “I wouldn’t attend, wouldn’t support, wouldn’t go to,” a private institution that discriminates, he told Rachel Maddow. But he would let them discriminate. And in the segregated South, that would’ve been a perfectly viable business model for many, many very important institutions.
(click to continue reading Ezra Klein – Rand Paul may not be a racist, but he is an extremist.)
but I am of the mind that if something walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and defends the rights of ducks to discriminate against non-ducks, than they are a duck. In other words, Rand Paul would be happy if American apartheid returned, and slaves became 3/5 of a person again. Despicable.