"Some people are taking this [Rachel Maddow] interview as proof that [Rand Paul is] a racist, that he supports discrimination. Now I don’t know if Rand Paul is racist. I don’t think this interview proves that he supports racism, but it does prove his ideal government just happens to be one that would open lots of door for racism and make discrimination of all kinds easier than it is now.
Does that prove that he’s some hard-core racist that doesn’t care about black people? No, but it does suggest he’s such a hard-core, purist libertarian that he cares more about this abstract set of principles than he cares about any actual people. That he’s more committed to these rigid abstractions than he is to protecting the basic rights of human beings in the real world. And if that’s the case, that means that this Civil Rights Act thing is just the tip of the iceberg.Rand, who is against politics as usual, gives answers which are Southern politics as usual. He says he is not a racist, but is for a system that would allow racism. It's the race card that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perfected. You can't say "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" in the South, so you use a coded language. Opposing the Equal Rights laws resonates with his hick constituents.
That means there’s a whole lot of situations that where, if Rand Paul has to describe his beliefs in detail, his beliefs are going to sound really weird and alienating. And I think Rand Paul knows that, and that’s why he trying so hard not to describe his own beliefs in plain English."
