Last night Rachel Maddow and newly elected Tea Party icon Rand Paul son of Congressman Ron Paul square off over the Civil Rights Act..
This should give you some keen insight into the political mindset of the Pauls and what they are ultimately about..
Here’s a brief summary from Mediaite
Since last Tuesday, it’s been morning after week for Kentucky Senate Republican candidate Rand Paul. While he recorded interviews at NPR and The O’Reilly Factor today, he didn’t waste any time booking himself for the toughest interview he could find. Tonight, that interview was on The Rachel Maddow Show. Don’t be deceived by the lack of shouting– this was by far the most heated exchange of the night across cable news.
It wasn’t the first time Paul was on the program– in fact, he had announced his candidate for Kentucky Senate on The Rachel Maddow Show months before. But last night’s interview was almost like a science experiment: put two of the most ideologically pure people in the politi-media world together to challenge each other on one of the issues they each care about the most. For Paul, that issue is the rights of the individual and the danger of the federal government stepping over them. For Rachel Maddow, the issue is institutional discrimination and the moral obligation to abolish it. That, at least, is how each one of them saw the respective problems and successes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Paul had been coming under attack for allegedly opposing.
While, as he has before, Paul reiterated that he personally hates racism and, for the most part, likes the Civil Rights Act, he is definitely giving people the space to assume that he would be ok with segregated businesses, because he expects the practice to negatively affect a business so much that the market wold take care of eliminating racism without the government getting in the way. It’s a consistent application of his ideology, but Maddow counters that, in practice, the market just hasn’t proven enough of a detractor to ensure that racism will not be institutionalized.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3O2rBz9gwo