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2016 Presidential Race Underway

Posted April 7th, 2015 at 1:52 pm (UTC-4)
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Libertarian and Tea Partier Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, joined the 2016 presidential race, and instantly grabbed the attention of the party, the media and opinion columnists.

Paul Pins 2016 Hopes on His Iconoclastic Views

Margaret Carlson – Bloomberg News

Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who formally announced his presidential campaign Tuesday, may be counting on his likability to buy him time to make a coherent whole of his myriad parts. He is attempting to merge his iconoclastic self, the tea-party persona that brought him to Washington and his familial libertarianism, even as he tries to draw the establishment and social-conservative wings of the party he needs to win a few primaries.

It’s working and it isn’t. He is on the short list of candidates to take seriously, but sooner or later he will have to choose who he loves most. Is it the libertarians he grew up with as the son of the anti-government, anti-defense serial presidential candidate Ron Paul? Or those on the left and students entranced by his unorthodox positions on criminal justice, privacy, drug-law liberalization, small defense and isolationism?

At the same time, he has to woo the base if he is going to be a serious contender.

Columnists were quick to examine Paul’s public statements and draw conclusions about his worldview.

Rand Paul in War and Peace

Bernie Quigley – The Hill

One of those strange men who fell to earth last century, physicist Niels Bohr, made the observation that matter in the universe is made up of particles and waves. Matter can be particle or wave, but it cannot be both at the same time. It might be understood in our political world as outward-looking or inward-looking; a politician can be outward-looking or inward-looking, but not both at the same time. And that is Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) problem. He wants it both ways.

We appear condemned to see only outward and there we see only enemies; China, Russia and radical Islam, rushing madly from one to the next, much like the frenetic federal agent Jack Bauer in the popular TV series “24.” We are locked out of the path to grace marked for us in the old Book of Common Prayer: “In returning and rest we shall be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength.”

Instead, we get this:

“As commander in chief, the world will know that our object is peace, but the world will not to mistake our desire for peace for passivity. The world should not mistake reluctance for inaction,” [Paul] said at a rally near the aircraft carrier in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina.

“And if war should prove unavoidable, America will fight with overwhelming force and we will not relent until victory is ours,” he said.

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