Sen. Rand Paul has been calling former President Clinton a sexual predator for weeks, but he is telling his fellow Republicans not to call President Obama names.
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At a Tea Party Patriots event, Sen. Paul (R-KY) said:
In order for us to be a bigger party though, we have to reach out to more people, not just those of us here. It has to be a bigger party. It has to be a bigger movement. There are times, and I don’t think it is our movement, but there are times when people are using language that shouldn’t be used.
I recently criticized someone for using some of than language, and I’m not going to bring it up, but I will say that we can disagree with the president without calling him names. We can disagree. I disagree almost all of the time with the president, okay? But I don’t call him names, and I am polite to him when I meet him. I’m not saying that our problem, but are people out in the public, and that’s taking away from our message, so let’s try not to be part of that.
Here is the problem with what Sen. Paul was saying. He has been running around for weeks telling anyone who would listen that former president Bill Clinton is a sexual predator.
On Meet The Press, Paul said, “Well, you know, I mean the Democrats one of their big issues is they have concocted and says Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office, and I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this.”
Using Rand Paul’s logic, it’s okay to call the former president, whose wife he may be running against in 2016, a sexual predator, but the current president is off limits. To put it another way, racism is bad, but sexism is good.
Rand Paul doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to lecturing others about name calling. It also speaks volumes that Paul had to tell an audience of adults the same thing that a grown up would tell a small child. One would think that adults already knew that it isn’t nice to call people names, but he was addressing a group of people who thought wearing tea bags on their heads was a serious form of political protest, so there’s that.
The quick and dirty summary of Paul’s point is that name calling is bad if hurts Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, but perfectly acceptable if it helps.
Kentucky senators who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing such large stones.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
