L'état, c'est moi.
Don't laugh; I'm going to warn you in advance that this story begins with the words
"Rand Paul's brain trust."
Rand Paul's brain trust has spent months developing an exhaustive political and legal battle plan to ensure he can run for both Senate reelection and the White House in 2016—despite a Kentucky law that suggests otherwise.
Rand Paul's brain trust used to contain someone who had dubbed himself "
The Southern Avenger," so you can imagine it's a top-notch group of people. And they're engaged in the most conservative of all pursuits, the justification of Rand Paul's personal selfishness. If the man is willing to form his own one-man medical board in order to get around certification restrictions he found too inhibiting of his previous career, you can bet the previous will of Kentucky's voters and/or lawmakers and/or anyone else involved can go right to heck in the current case. Like a sterilized dinosaur in a poorly planned theme park,
Rand Paul will find a way.
The contingencies range from changing Kentucky into a presidential caucus state to filing a lawsuit challenging the law, from daring Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes to keep him off the ballot to taking her out next November if she does.
And if that doesn't work, he'll form his own Kentucky—one with blackjack, and hookers. And lots more fracking, if that'll help.
I admit I probably find Rand Paul's travails with the law more interesting than the vast majority of people do. To me it is yet another simple but effective example of how all American laws are meant for the little people. Any law out there is fine and good until it threatens to actually impede someone who has both ambition and power, at which point the law that governed all the rest of us for however long it governed us suddenly becomes untenable, and insulting, and outrageous, and the powerful man assembles a team of well-heeled lawyers to snip the law off with a pair of pruning shears, allowing Our Better to continue on his way unimpeded. We see it in Wall Street as an omnipresent force; we see it after each of the various attempts to curb the ability of the rich to purchase election outcomes outright; we see it in everything from property and zoning laws to the foreclosure courts to the punishments meted out for accidentally mowing down the little people during a night of drunk driving.
Yes, yes, these are all very fine laws, my friends, but Mr. Rand Paul is a very important man. I think we all understand that our previous laws were never meant to apply to someone as very important as he is. Quickly—let us change them to reflect our new understanding of these things, so that Mr. Paul can be on his way.