Rand Paul Fades Away

Rand Paul started out from a position quite different from most Republicans, strongly libertarian on domestic issues (other than abortion) and strongly opposed to foreign entanglements. These days he is hard to tell from the other candidates. The rest of the crowd has moved toward Paul's call for radically shrinking the government at home, and he has moved toward their belligerence abroad. Now he has taken the position that will insure he never gets any support from anti-war liberals:

Republican presidential candidate and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he supports military action against Iran to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon, even though he says it would only delay Iran getting a bomb.

Well, that's a puzzler. It won't do any good to attack Iran, but we should do it anyway. Nobody pressed Paul to explain this nonsense, which saved him the trouble of covering up for the real reason: because opposing Obama over Iran has become something that all Republicans must do to be taken seriously, and Paul wants to be taken seriously.

At this point Paul holds no more interest for me, and I suspect I speak for most anti-war voters who found him intriguing. He doesn't seem to hold much interest for Republican voters, either, since in the latest polls he is scoring under 5 percent. His attempt to run for president as a different kind of Republican was probably doomed from the start. Sadly he has chosen to sacrifice his anti-intervention principles in a futile effort to compete, rather than defying the party as his father did, so he is losing his credibility along with the race. Sigh.