The Patriot Post® · Rand Paul: Too Little, Too Late

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/34772-rand-paul-too-little-too-late-2015-04-25

Politicians have even found a way to make presidential races boring. As you may have noticed, nobody ever just says, “I’m running.” First they have to announce they’re forming an exploratory committee, meaning they’re not only calling everyone they’ve ever laid eyes on, hoping they’ll cough up a few bucks, but haranguing the rest of us suckers.

Next they announce that they’ll make an announcement in a month. Then the day before the month is up, they announce their decision is coming tomorrow. Finally, the big day arrives, the politician shows up at a venue where nobody is likely to throw a ripe tomato in his direction and admits that after checking with his wife, kids, God and, most importantly, the guy in charge of collecting campaign funds, he has decided to do us all a favor by running for, if not the best job in the world, at least the job with the very best perks.

So it was that Sen. Rand Paul finally told us that he is, indeed, sure enough, no kidding, aiming to run. Had he checked with me, I would have told him he’s wasting his time. For one thing, the 2016 election is going to revolve around foreign affairs, mainly because Obama has done an even worse job there than he has domestically, and Sen Paul, although he has tried to adjust his sails accordingly, has a wishy-washy record in that area.

But perhaps even worse for Kentucky’s junior senator is the fact that he’s not even the 5-foot-8 he claims to be. He’s like a guy who’s 5-foot-10 and claims to be a six-footer. Understand, I’m short, so I’m not piling on. It’s just that American voters don’t like their presidents to look like they’re standing in a hole when they’re facing off with their fellow debaters, let alone foreign leaders. Going eye-to-eye is one thing, but going eye-to-chin will never do.

Having said that I believe that foreign affairs — specifically dealing with radical Islam, whether it calls itself al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, ISIS or the Taliban — will be the foremost issue in 2016, I have decided it just might be time for America to once again look to its military for leadership. If so, I can’t think of a better man than Lt. General Mike Flynn (ret.), the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’s smart, he’s tough and he’s not reluctant to call the Islamic scum by their real name, which just happens to be Islamic scum.

In short, he is everything Obama isn’t. Every day in every way, Obama does or says something that should embarrass every American. I mean, how can anyone continue to defend and support a man who says, in regards to the deal he is trying to push with Iran: “What we will be doing even as we enter into this agreement is send a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire world that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there,” when we all know he despises Benjamin Netanyahu and has utter contempt for the Jewish nation.

If he had an ounce of honesty, he would have actually concluded the statement by saying “…if anybody messes with Israel, it will be America.”

But when it comes to any religion aside from Islam, Obama can be counted on to add fuel to the fire. He made his position clear on Christianity seven years ago when he dismissed evangelicals to a covey of wealthy San Francisco creeps “as those people who cling to their guns and their religion,” at one fell swoop deriding the first two amendments of the Constitution.

Then, earlier this year, at the annual Prayer Breakfast, he told Christians to get off their high horse when it comes to Muslims, pointing out that there was a lot of blood-letting during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, ignoring the rather obvious fact that there’s a whale of a difference between Muslims butchering Christians today and Christians misbehaving several centuries ago. To use Obama’s favorite word, Christians have clearly evolved over the years and, if anything, Muslims have only gotten worse.

Next, proving that he meant what he said, Obama took advantage of an Easter Prayer Breakfast held on the Tuesday after Easter (presumably because he had a golf date on Sunday), to announce that he is deeply troubled when he hears “less than loving comments from Christians.” It is widely assumed that he was referring to the pushback by those who feel their religious freedoms are being systematically violated by a president who obviously believes that the whims of homosexuals trump the First Amendment rights of devout Christians.

It should be said there is a certain consistency to Obama’s madness. For at the same time that Obama refuses to even call Islamic barbarians “Islamic,” he refuses to identify the Christians being murdered in Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Kenya, by their religion. In his dementia, he no doubt regards that as being even-handed.

The fact, though, is that the mainstream media is even worse than Obama. I base that on the fact that they will still be around after January 20, 2017, lying and providing cover for anything the Democrats do or say. One example of the left-wing Munchkins doing what they do best was the way they refused to even report that when then Majority Leader of the Senate Harry Reid was questioned about lying in 2012, claiming that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid his taxes in over a decade, he simply smirked and said, “Well, he didn’t win, did he?”

Yet another example was when Barack Obama traded five high-ranking jihadists for one Army deserter, insisting America brings home its military veterans. Nobody from the NY Times or the major TV networks, you might have noticed, asked why in that case, had he let Marine Andrew Tahmooressi rot in a Mexican jail for months on end and why, prior to even negotiating with Javad Zarif, he didn’t insist that Iran immediately release imprisoned Marine veteran Amir Hakmati and Christian pastor Saeed Abadino.

But the tragic fact is that nobody seriously believes that Obama cares for members of the American military or Christian clerics any more than the Ayatollah Khamenei does.

Finally, a reader wrote to me wondering why virtually anyone who’s anyone in Hollywood appears to be a liberal. I replied, “There are a number of reasons. Partly it’s their parents. Liberals, after all, begat liberals. Partly it’s the media. Partly it’s the public schools and colleges. Partly, of course, it’s their friends and colleagues.

"Mainly, though, it’s all that, plus they live in a bubble in which everyone around them thinks and acts the same way. Like juveniles who all dress identically and who all stick shiny metal objects in their cheeks, noses and tongues, they’re convinced they’re striking a blow for individualism.

"An additional factor is that a great many of the most influential people in Hollywood come from five of the blocs that form the base of the Democratic Party; namely, Jews, single women, blacks, wealthy environmentalists and homosexuals.

"But does anyone really believe that 99.9% of those running the business actually came to Hollywood with their brains deposited in their posteriors? Of course not. But they quickly came to understand that if they didn’t fall into political lockstep, particularly on so-called social issues, they might as well catch the first Greyhound bus back to Kansas, Texas and South Carolina.

"After a while, they become totally acclimated to their new environment and can barely breathe outside the bubble of liberalism; at which point, they become full-fledged zombies and have SAG, DGA and WGA cards to prove it!”