Jesus, this guy is as much of a fucking brain dead moron as the rest of his inbred compatriots seem to be. As this article points out, jon stewart eviscerates him on his Thursday night show with Larry Wilmore coming in to piss on the corpse in a way that only Larry Wilmore can.
Essentially Paul tries to harken back to the abolitionist roots of the party while ignoring the fact that for the past 50 years they have essentially co-opted the ground occupied by former “Dixie-crats.”
I could go on, but watch the opening segment and when you’re done pissing yourself, come back and join the discussion.
It’s lovely the way that white Republicans are mystified by black people voting against them so overwhelmingly, recognize that the root of the problem might be ignorance, but totally misread whose ignorance is at the root of the problem. If Paul had gone to Howard to learn instead of to teach, the exchange might have had some point to it.
This follows on the heels of his speech to Latinos about how their values are Republican values. No. . .no, they’re not. They favor both abortion and gay marriage by a large margin.
Bigotry is a Grand Old Party, isn’t it? Their favorite supreme court justice openly mocks the Voting Rights Act while suppress the vote efforts have been a staple of the Republican playbook since Rhenquist was harassing black voters 50 years ago. The only stupid, uneducated and willfully ignorant people I see are guys like Rand Paul. Honest to goodness Sen. Paul, it is neither brave nor crazy to speak to a group of black university students. The idea that it is either insults everyone in the room but you, which it self-congratulates on its bigoted assumptions.
Rand Paul’s embarrassing performances will lower the bar so low that whatever the Republicans do from now on will seem impressive. This is the best outcome the GOP can hope for. Perhaps this has been their goal all along.
Second best thing is that they learn from these disasters. First lesson: Don’t brag about how brave you are to speak in a room full of black people. It makes you look racist.
I think what we’re seeing is that Paul is one of handful of Republicans (including Rubio and Cruz) who are trying to call attention to themselves. This is because the media have fixed on them as the “answer” to the party’s “problem”–for no other reason than that they are youngish in comparison with the standard guard–and the party would like to think that what happened in 2012 was nothing other than a simple lack of younger faces.
So these guys are all groping around clumsily to get noticed, and they end up revealing their craven characters in the process. It’s as though every one of them has completely forgotten what happened in the primaries last year, with the older guys.
True, but I will give him a few points for effort for showing up. It’s the same way I felt about Romney speaking to the NAACP. I will still likely never vote for a GOP camdidates, but volunteering to speak to an audience you know vehemently disagrees with you is something most politicians on either side try to avoid.
Many of these guys live and work within 20 miles of Howard, and probably couldn’t point to it on a map. So even though he went there and spouted a bunch of nonsense, at least he showed up.
Rand Paul is dumber than a bag of rocks, but since he’s willing to look and sound stupid on camera the press loves him. Expect to see a lot more grandstanding, and bit by bit he will dumb down the discussion and pick safer audiences, and the press who are lazier than a Libyan flag designer will keep reporting it all as if it were actual news.
I’m gonna say, “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The GOP needs minorities and young people; that’s the lesson of the 2012 election. Doing what you have to do to survive doesn’t get you points.
Besides, Sen. Aqua Buddha was so dumb, ignorant and inherently condescending that he loses far more points on that side of the ledger than he can get back any other way. He didn’t think black students at Howard University knew that Lincoln was a Republican, and that Jim Crow was the work of Southern Democrats? And apparently he didn’t think the history of the parties and race relations from 1964 on meant anything, right up to the GOP’s current efforts to institute barriers to voting that affect blacks more, or dilute the impact of black votes by packing as many blacks as possible into the districts that would be majority black anyway. (Maybe he is too dumb to make the connection between this and blacks’ attitudes towards Republicans.) Nor do I expect he even knew that the GOP’s abandonment of support for the freed blacks of the South dates back to 1876.
Republicans increasingly swallow their own propaganda, and this is a classic for-instance. They’ve been telling their base for eons that blacks only vote for Democrats because welfare and free stuff, and that if blacks only had their eyes opened about how the Dems are really trying to keep them on the plantation and Republicans want them to be free, they’d come around. Sen. Aqua Buddha buys into this thoroughly enough to try to pass it off as the truth to a crowd of well-educated young black people.
No, this ignorant bozo deserves no points for anything.
Also, Romney spoke to the NAACP basically for the purpose of saying objectionable things and getting booed; his real audience was his base who feels that anytime blacks don’t like whites, it’s because they’re racist. He gets negative points for showing up, because he wasn’t trying to have a conversation; he was using his immediate audience as props.
Give Mitt some credit, too, for going after the points of the Brickbacons of this world, who are naive benefit-of-the-doubt types eager to dispense credit across the political spectrum.
There’s absolutely no evidence of these people being able to learn anything. Face it, if they had that capability they probably wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place.
Perhaps this is another goal of these attempts. Because their lameness makes speaking in front of black audiences sans embarrassment seem impossibly hard, they are able to garner sympathy points just for “trying”. They don’t actually have to do anything. “Trying” is all that matters.
“If the black people can’t see we’re honestly trying, then we don’t know what else we can do for them!”
You know Romney wasn’t doing anything new, right? McCain spoke there when he was running and he received a polite reception even if he didn’t win any voters. W. Bush spoke there twice, his 2000 speech was actually fairly good. The whole “NAACP is hostile to Republicans” was just the Romney campaign trying to justify his failure to be a likeable human being.
Exactly. The first step toward getting more black voters to vote Republican isn’t to tell them to do so. The first step is to ask black voters why they’re not voting Republican, and then to really listen to the answers.
Paul and many others have locked themselves in an echo chamber in which their views are unassailably right, and anyone who objects to them is only doing so out of ignorance. As long as he (and others) continue to believe that, they have zero chance of winning converts from outside the echo chamber.