You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

This is fun. And easy. An anonymous commenter piquefully asks:

Oh, really? Please be so kind as to go to [Rand Paul's] official campaign web site and actually quote just one of the good doctor's "worthwhile causes".

Well. Officially, Rand Paul opposes the massive transfer of wealth from private citizens to speculative corporate entitities, is a critic of the Fed and recognizes that "the Federal Reserve, an unelected group of private bankers, is printing trillions of dollars to bail out private industry, purchase government debt, and flood the market with cheap credit." He supports term limits, an admittedly minor but entirely defensible issue, if you're into the whole brevity thing. Finally:

Whether it’s passing the 315 page Patriot Act without a single member of Congress ever reading the bill, proposing a National ID Card, establishing FISA courts and utilizing warrantless searches, or betraying the medical privacy of ordinary citizens, the Federal Government has overstepped its limited powers as stipulated in the Constitution.

Rand Paul seeks to reassert the rights and privileges of the 50 states and over 300 million Americans. The Federal Government must return to its constitutionally enumerated powers and restore our inalienable rights. Rand proposes that America can successfully protect itself against potential terrorists without sacrificing civil liberties. Rand rejects the premise that the Federal Government must be given a blank check in the name of national security.

America can prosper, preserve personal liberty, and repel national security threats without intruding into the personal lives of its citizens.

So, officially, there you have it.

Now it is wholly valid to say that Paul doesn't really believe these things, or that his law-and-order, protect-the-borders schtick inherently contradicts his stance on liberty and privacy, or that his appeals to States Rights and localism are coded racism, or that his opposition to the Fed plays opportunistically on prevalent conspiracy-mongering within the so-called Tea-Party movement. You can say that his promises to fight for Constitutional governance are no more believable than Barack Obama's, although you'd have to be a fairly credulous Democratic partisan to go quite that far. The fact remains that the Democratic, "progressive" position is now that an executive-expanding, authoritarian, oligarchic militarist in the actual White House, ruling the actual American empire, is less threatening and somehow less worthy of criticism than a potential junior senator who has made some fairly thoughtless comments about race. Whatever, dears. To be fair, I think it is in fact not a bad thing that there exists so strong a social bias against racially insensitive speech that a few questionable comments elicit a furious, snarling rhetorical fussilade that, say, killing the population of a distant village or arrogating to oneself the power to murder anyone, anywhere does not . . . although obviously the very existence of such powerful social bias also suggests that federal legislation is not necessarily the only means of rectifying or addressing racial inequality. That having been said, and to reiterate once more a point that cannot be made often enough, it is not criticism of Rand Paul or the Tea Party movement to which I object, but rather the plain, blinkered belief of so many levelling the criticsm that it is a gang of disaffected and unhappy crypto-Republican political pseudo-activists who represent a greater problem, a greater evil, and a greater injustice (or potential injustice) than the operations of the bipartisan American hegemon, headed by His Jumpshot Himself.

Well, our little club is used to it. In the same way that a couple of SOI-DISANT conservative commenters enjoy reading our vociferous critique of the American empire and our qualified defenses of Iran's right to exist like any other nation as some kind of abiding approval of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Islamic Republic, so too are we inured to the evident liberal belief that the qualified defense of certain aspects of Rand Paul, or the Tea Partiers, or what have you, represents a secret pining for lynch mobs and segregation.