Monday, June 22, 2015

Rand Paul: Still Just Making Stuff Up


You would think, as a person who's been burned in the recent past by his loose connection with the truth, Sen. "Ayn" Rand Paul (Dudebro-KY), would be a little more careful with historic accuracy.  And you would be wrong.

Via Buzzfeed:
Many of the quotes attributed to the Founding Fathers in two of Rand Paul’s books are either fake, misquoted, or taken entirely out of context, BuzzFeed News has found.
Paul’s first two books — Government Bullies, which was an e-book best-seller, and The Tea Party Goes to Washington — lay out the conservative manifesto he hoped to bring to Washington following the tea party wave in 2010.
A heavy theme in Paul’s books is that the tea party movement is the intellectual heir to the Founding Fathers, with Paul often arguing he knows what position our country’s earliest leaders would have had on certain issues(our emphasis)
"Ayn" Rand seems to have a particular fondness for attributing faux quotes to Thomas Jefferson, presumably in order to convince his knuckle-dragging, low-information tea bagger audiences that, yessir, they are freedom freedumb fighters in the American revolutionary tradition when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.

These books have been out there for some time, and the misquotes of the various Founding Fathers have been used by "Ayn" Rand for years with no consequences.  But since he's fond of quotes, here's one, the proof of which he's been relying on, that we'd like to offer: "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."