The problem with Rand Paul isn't that he is a racist. It is that he is a fool.
In speaking with Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC show, Paul probably sunk his own Tea Party-Republican candidacy for the Senate. Everything was there. The references to William Lloyd Garrison, the abstruse discussion about the Civil Rights Act, the loopy comments about forcing restaurant owners to accept someone toting guns onto their property -- all testify to the bizarre mental world that Paul inhabits. Why is he even discussing the Civil Rights Act in 2010? Shall we debate the decision to intervene in World War II, while we're at it?
Maddow kept trying to throw Paul lifelines, to drag him back to the shores of reality, but Paul just kept blathering on, blissfully and cheerfully oblivious to his own lunacy. For much of the time, he engaged in self-pity about how the media was distorting his comments, but they don't even require interpretation. They refute themselves.
It's one thing to encounter a verbally incontinent doctor when you're confined in a medical chair, where he can't really do much harm, apart from boring you to tears. But it's quite another to make him your Senator. This garrulous gasbag is so crazy that he makes Kentucky's current Senator Jim Bunning look like the soul of rationality.
Is it something in the bluegrass that produces these kooks in Kentucky? The upside is that Paul's primary victory will ensure that, if nothing else, the Kentucky race will continue to provide ample political fodder for the rest of the year.
It's almost enough to make you think that Democrats helped Paul overcome Trey Grayson by switching party registration for the Kentucky primary. They can only hope for more confessions from Paul and that he continues to party on. This is an opthamologist who can't see straight.