Oh, Sen. Rand Paul.
Where would we be without you.
During a visit to the Christian school founded by Jerry Falwell, Paul looked to energize conservative supporters by warning that people who are short, overweight or less intelligent could be eliminated through abortion.
“In your lifetime, much of your potential — or lack thereof — can be known simply by swabbing the inside of your cheek,” Paul said to a packed sporting arena on Liberty’s campus. “Are we prepared to select out the imperfect among us?”
The moment there's a cheek swab that can scientifically determine how intelligent you are, I'm launching a drive for a constitutional amendment mandating use of the test before any candidate for national office is allowed onto the ballot. I'm not saying they have to be geniuses—but if we weed out all those who stab themselves in the eye while trying to insert the swab into their mouth, we might at least start to get somewhere.
Paul is in Virginia attempting to drum up support for aspirational Handmaid's Tale villain Ken Cuccinelli. It's curious how drawn hard-right conservatives are to certain notions of future doom while simultaneously being bored and dismissive of others. The notion of sea level rise, now that's been a tough sell; the notion that allowing abortion at all will lead to a eugenic dystopia punishing the infirm, though, will have certain crowds in a froth.
Which is puzzling, because three quarters of what the Rand Pauls of the nation are demanding are, of course, punishing the infirm. We shouldn't give them health care, because if they want health care they should have been smart enough to be born healthy. We shouldn't give them food, because they should get their own damn food. We shouldn't demand they not be discriminated against because it is the God-given right of every American business to discriminate however the damn hell they want to, because freedom, subsection money.
I can imagine a future dystopia where we elect moralizing crackpots who demand we make certain kinds of sexual behavior between consenting adults illegal because God doesn't like it. I can imagine a dystopia where we tell the poor to go to hell rather than helping them get food because we consider poverty to be a sole product of laziness, not of circumstance. I can imagine a world of death panels based on who is born with a preexisting condition and who isn't, or based solely on how much money you have in your wallet when the ambulance comes to fetch you. All of those things seem plausible, but Rand Paul doesn't spend much time worrying about those. I blame his father; being a loudmouthed crackpot definitely runs in his family.
Tue Oct 29, 2013 at 11:12 AM PT: As a side note, Rachel Maddow and co. discovered that portions of Rand Paul's speech seem to have been lifted wholesale from Wikipedia entries. This would be a crushing blow to Paul's reputation if he had any pretense of being clever, intellectual, or honest, but since none of those things are near Paul's wheelhouse I think we can chalk up that plagiarism in the spirit it was intended: as lazy schoolboy dribbling out a half-hearted effort in his school presentation, not entirely sure what eugenic or dystopia means but knowing it has something to do with a movie he once watched.