Rand Paul's Literary Libertarianism

The feisty Kentucky Senator, formerly an eye doctor, has been reading other people’s charts--by the pageful. Accused last week of including chunks from Wikipedia in stump speeches, he is now caught lifting sections for an article he “wrote” for the Washington Times.

He comes by his problems with authorship congenitally. In 2011, while running for President, his father Ron Paul was caught out for racist newsletters under his name, denying he had ever read or written “the stuff.”

Now, the younger Paul is offering to fight duels over plagiarism charges against him by “hacks and haters.”

The Senator certainly has a way with words. Last spring, he poured out 13 hours of them in a Senate filibuster and then took credit for influencing the Administration’s policy on the domestic use of drones, when the actual heavy lifting was done by a mouthy colleague, freshman Ted Cruz.

As 2016 approaches, the two will no doubt be filling the air and pages with reams of rhetoric. As far as we can tell, Cruz will be using sentences and paragraphs of his own devising.

That won’t make them any less loathsome.