Rand Paul on Civil Rights: Even the GOP Realizes How Goofy He Is

Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul, after he made public his backward views on civil rights, which basically are that private enterprises should have the right to discriminate.

Paul, son of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2008 and who also has a list of his own screwball ideas, is finding himself sitting in a corner drinking fruit punch by himself. Even Republicans were like, "Wha...?" when Rand told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "If you want to harbor in about private businesses and their policies, then you have to have the discussion about do you want to abridge the First Amendment as well."

This is ironic given that it was the Republicans who overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

And when Paul did not show up for an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN, "He's said quite enough."

Now there are calls for Republicans to kick Paul to the curb because he's becoming, well, another Sarah Palin at a time when the Party is trying to win back the House and Senate in the November elections. But despite what conservatives are playing up as majority backlash against President Barack Obama's policies, most Americans really can't grasp the idea of businesses being able to tell a black person that he can't be served at a lunch counter.

Even the GOP Chairman, Soul Brotha No. 1 Michael Steele, has distanced himself from Paul's comments, saying he "wasn't comfortable with it."

Paul, like most Libertarians, gets his views from author Ayn Rand, whose 'Atlas Shrugged' espoused a fear of government domination of private industry and the free market. Basically in that book, all those who had good ideas disappeared to a fortress in the mountains, while government wound up in control of everything and society went to pot.

Here's the thing, though, government overreaching into the free market really is a bad thing, but in reality, a complete laissez-faire approach does not work either. What Paul and other Libertarians perceive as a healthy "hands-off" approach to private industry, with little or no regulation, results in events such as the BP oil spill, which has far eclipsed 1989's Exxon-Valdez as the worst spill in U.S. history.

Besides that, and Republicans with good foresight realize this, allowing businesses to turn away customers based on superficial things such as race would backfire on whites, because of the rapid demographic shifts taking place in the country. By 2050, there will be a majority of people of color, primarily Hispanic, in this country. With Paul's logic, any Mexican could tell a white guy his business isn't wanted.

If that trend continued, you'd have a whole population of minority whites, poor and the destitute unable to get basic needs unless they were from the government. Eventually that would create swaths of impoverished areas of people whose whole being would be dependent on the feds providing for them. Sound familiar? I've seen it before myself and the word for it is, um, A GHETTO!

So Paul, if he chooses, has got some damage control to do if he expects to win in Kentucky against competitor Jack Conway, who got more votes in the Democratic primary than Paul did in the Republican primary. Plus, if this guy's mouth shoots off any more, Republicans may wind up interfering by stuffing a shoe in it.