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Bill Straub: Thank goodness Rand wasn’t in charge: doesn’t like masks or wearing one, wants Fauci in jail


Sen. Rand Paul has been fortunate enough over the past 12 years to serve with comrades like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-AR, whose repugnant demeanor and oily overall disposition has diverted attention away from the massive dreadfulness the Kentucky lawmaker has consistently displayed in the nation’s capital.

But faced with re-election this year, the Bowling Green Republican, God bless him, has seized center stage, determined to claim the crown as the biggest boob in what allegedly is the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Competition for the title is intense indeed. But our boy Rand is in there pitching, mowing down all comers with the sort of nausea-inducing manner rarely seen this side of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO.

The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com

Rand is stepping up game and, Kentucky, you should be so proud.

Where to begin. . .

Rand doesn’t like masks, which should come as no surprise since nobody likes having to wear a mask – they render it difficult to breathe, are uncomfortable and you’re always just outside the supermarket door when you realize you left it in the car parked about a quarter-mile away.

But Paul REALLY doesn’t like masks and he has staged a one-man war against their use, disregarding the fact they were imposed by government and businesses in many quarters to combat the spread of COVID-19, the pandemic that his claimed a million lives, give or take, in these United States over the past two years, meaning we have lost the equivalent of the population of Louisville and Lexington combined.

There exists an ongoing debate between health care advocates, who support mask wearing, and politicians like Paul, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, and, apparently, some north-of-the-border truck drivers who would rather strain vomit than put one on.

The health care advocates, both on the public and private side, maintain it will at least slow the spread of the virus and offer some protection to others in the community. Opponents say it ain’t worth a plugged nickel and, well, frankly, they just don’t wanna wear the damn thing.

Now what side are you going to listen to, the health care folks or the guys looking for votes?

Here’s a question that might help you decide – what possible rationale do health care advocates have for promoting mask usage if it’s baloney? Have they cornered the mask market, thus providing them with untold riches? Is it a big, coordinated practical joke that provides them with the giggles looking at those who comply with the requirements? Are we in the middle of some Monty Python sketch? It’s probably a good idea to acknowledge the mask proponents don’t much care for wearing one either, so why would they go through this interminable process?
Regardless, the prophet from Warren County now seeks to end the compulsory donning of masks on commercial air flights, where folks naturally sit in close proximity to one another, setting the stage for a potential COVID spread party.

But Paul, it turns out, has a very good reason for abolishing the existing airline mask mandate.

“I’m tired of paying the airlines to be treated like crap when I get on the plane,” he said on Newsmax’s Spicer & Co on Tuesday.

Well, okay then. Why didn’t you just say so?

Paul further explained, if that’s the proper use of the term, that “there’s no reason to be wearing them on the planes,” and that the exercise is “a joke, it’s theater.” And last July he introduced legislation banning mask mandates on public transportation.

As part of his growing obsession with masks and other regulations implemented to fight COVID, Paul last week expressed support for the concept of truckers suborning chaos by blocking arteries in major American cities like Los Angeles, site of Super Bowl LVI, to protest COVID restrictions, an idea that, thankfully, fell flat since the truckers, like most Americans, wanted to hurry home and catch the game on TV.

Asked by The Daily Signal, a conservative publication sponsored by The Heritage Foundation, if he supported the type of protests initiated by truckers in Canada that rendered roadways in Ottawa impassable, Paul responded, “it’d be great” if American haulers “clog things up.”
“I’m all for it,” Paul said. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.”

Indeed, there is a tradition of peaceful protest in this country. It generally has involved efforts to end racism, halt an immoral war, gain equality for women or seek a world with no nukes. If you think anger over wearing a mask to stop the spread of a terrible disease is analogous to those campaigns, you go right ahead and hop in the cab of any given semi, senator, but keep in mind that the results of peaceful protests often end up with participants being jailed.

See if you have to wear a mask in the hoosegow.

Oh, and he wants Dr. Anthony Fauci to go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Paul’s harassment of Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has led the federal government’s anti-COVID effort, has been one of the most unseemly, appalling displays that has plagued Washington DC since the onset of the pandemic. Paul has been critical of Fauci’s efforts, which is fine, unreasonable but fine, given Paul’s status of a lawmaker empowered to raise issues and ask questions.

But his questioning of Fauci has ventured way beyond tolerable, with Paul assuming the role of Torquemada during the Inquisition, issuing threats, questioning Fauci’s morality, directing personal insults and behaving like the ghost of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.

Now he’s slobbering all over himself to send Fauci to the can.
 
“We are opposed to him,” Paul said during an interview with NewsMax, another right-wing organ (is there a pattern developing here?). “He should be in jail.”

If he wins re-election in November and subsequently assumes the chair of the Senate Health Committee if Republicans re-take the chamber, Paul said he will subpoena all of Fauci’s records and investigate whether COVID-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, that receives partial funding from U.S. sources.

“So he does fear us,” Paul said, apparently proud of his abusive ways.

It seems like the nation is, finally, drawing close to easing some of the restrictions put in place to fight the pandemic. We’re not quite there yet. But incidences are generally declining and the long nightmare might soon be over. But our boy Rand is, as usual, trying to jump the gun, opening the jet door before the plane has landed, all for, as he said in the NewsMax interview about Fauci, that this is “what politics is about, and I’m not pulling any punches.”

There’s an old saying the applies here – if someone insists on showing you who they are, believe them. Rand Paul has shown, in a straight forward way, pretty contemptible. Yet, he has a better-than-even chance of gaining re-election. So it goes.

But is it so unthinkable to ask Kentucky voters, before they cast their ballots, to ponder just how much worse the COVID plague would have turned out to be had Sen. Rand Paul, R-Bowling Green, been in charge.


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2 Comments

  1. Ken Hawkins says:

    Please read, The Real Anthony Fauci,by Robert F. Kennedy. If you can read that history which chronicles his history from the mid eighties with AIDS, countless experimentation with children’s diseases, and finally with Covid, then you can express opinions knowing the many sides of Anthony Fauci.

  2. Meg says:

    When a Democrat gives his biased opinion about a conservative physician I’ll vote for the medical expert and NOT the journalist. HEPA filters 99% of germs on planes. No need for masks there at all. Remember we are talking about nanoparticles. Rand is on the right side of history. Fauci and friends are just paid bureaucrats living of the taxpayers…

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