"Rand Paul and the G.O.P.’s Ball of Cheerful Hate" Posted by Amy Davidson at the New Yorker

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Rand Paul and the G.O.P.’s Ball of Cheerful Hate

Posted by Amy Davidson at the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/rand-paul-and-the-gop-ball-of-cheerful-hate.html

"SNIP................................


To start simply: John McCain hates Rand Paul, so much that he suggested, to The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner, that he might prefer Hillary Clinton for President. Chris Christie hates Rand Paul, so much so that he said he was not interested in having a beer with him. Rand Paul seems to hate Chris Christie, since he called him the King of Bacon and mocked him to an audience in Tennessee by saying, “Gimme, gimme, gimme—give me all my Sandy money now.” But then Christie had compared Paul to Charles Lindbergh—for his isolationism, not the aviation. What was strange about the Paul-Christie spat was that Charles Krauthammer and other observers spoke of it solemnly, as though it was the intellectual engagement on the future of foreign policy that the G.O.P. had been longing for. Really what we were talking about was Christie saying that libertarians like Paul ought to come to Jersey and sit across from a 9/11 widow before saying that the N.S.A. shouldn’t collect all the information it wants to.


The other event of the week that was spoken of in similar terms was the Senate’s collective primal scream at Rand Paul when he introduced an amendment to take away Egypt’s foreign aid and to use the money on infrastructure at home. He lost, by a count of eighty-six to thirteen, after the debate was extended so that everyone had a chance to tell him that he was awful and would destroy America’s power. The tally would have been more “lopsided,” Dana Milbank wrote, except that “in the final seconds of the roll call and after the outcome was obvious, a bloc of six GOP lawmakers led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) quietly cast their votes with Paul—not in agreement with him but in fear of the tea party voters who adore him.” So there are also the people who hate Paul because they have to pretend to like him.

Republicans don’t just hate Rand Paul for being something of a libertarian. There are also those who would object to how Paul would use that foreign-aid money—for building bridges. The Tea Party has become a confused (and less and less useful) shorthand both for libertarians of the Justin Amash, anti-domestic-spying variety, and for those who just want to wildly cut taxes. On Thursday, the Senate and House gave up trying to pass a transportation bill. Instead, the Minority Whip, Eric Cantor, spent the day getting a bill through the House that would have prevented the I.R.S. from dealing with any part of Obamacare, including provisions that involve tax credits, because he and his colleagues hate the I.R.S., taxes, and government agencies doing their jobs. They do, however, love legislative action that gets them closer to their apparent goal of arranging a vote to repeal Obamacare for every member of the Republican caucus. (They are at forty.)

The I.R.S. bill will fail in the Senate, where Ted Cruz is busy adding on to the list of reasons that other Republicans hate him by zipping around saying that they are cowards if they don’t join him in threatening to stage a debt-ceiling-shutdown crisis unless Obamacare is defunded. “Let me be clear: I don’t trust the Republicans,” Cruz said. Democrats were at least candid about being “dangerous,” while too many members of the G.O.P. were joining a “surrender caucus.” He often smiles when he says things like that, so it’s hard to tell whom exactly he hates—maybe everybody. McCain hates it when anyone says that he’s too scared to vote for things that will cause the world economy to implode—“It’s been a long time since I’ve been scared,” he told ABC.

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1. The scary part is that this all reminds

me of a disorganized tropical storm. Let‘s hope it never forms an eye.