Forgiving Rand
by digby
This piece about how libertarianism’s only true home being on the right came to mind this morning when I read this article by Paul Waldman about Rand Paul’s rather convenient new position on military spending. In the original piece, the author contends that at one time he and all his libertrian friends were caught up in Obamamania, believing that he was going to be an economic moderate and an isolationist protector of civil liberties. (And considering that he was opposed by the warmongering hawk John McCain, you can see why at least a few of them might have leaned Obama’s way.) But he was betrayed by all that Keynesian Obamacaring and then found out about drones and so he realized that the GOP is his one true home. Sure, theocrats might want to impose their religious rules on everyone but they are willing to let states and local governments do the imposing rather than the feds so they’re not all that bad. And sure they all might be bloodthirsty warmongers and authoritarians but since there are some Democrats who are too it all comes out in the wash. And anyway, Rand Paul is a Republican and he definitely doesn’t support all that excessive military spending and foreign wars and all that.
The move completes a stunning reversal for Paul, who in May 2011, after just five months in office, released his own budget that would have eliminated four agencies—Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Energy and Education—while slashing the Pentagon, a sacred cow for many Republicans. Under Paul’s original proposal, defense spending would have dropped from $553 billion in the 2011 fiscal year to $542 billion in 2016. War funding would have plummeted from $159 billion to zero. He called it the “draw-down and restructuring of the Department of Defense.”
But under Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.
The boost would be offset by a two-year combined $212 billion cut to funding for aid to foreign governments, climate change research and crippling reductions in to the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Education.
Paul Waldman suggests he has to do this in order to compete for the presidential nomination because Republicans are warmongers and he’s right. But he thinks it could also be a problem for him because it makes him look like a hypocrite to his followers. And it should. But I’m going to guess this won’t worry the Paulites all that much. They are, after all, mostly young white guys who deep down in their hearts think military spending isn’t really the problem, it’s the government spending on losers, both foreign and domestic, who aren’t “self-sufficient” young white guys and imposing regulations that might impinge on their God-given freedom to exploit and pillage that pisses them off. The war business is unpleasant but it isn’t a deal breaker. If it were, they wouldn’t vote for the party that makes a fetish of them.
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