Ken Blackwell has come running to Rand Paul's defense, desperately trying to explain away Paul's post-primary claims that he didn't support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the idea of the government combating discrimination in private enterprises in general.
Or at least that seems to be Blackwell's goal, though it is hard to say as his "defense" is utterly incoherent:
[Rand Paul] a grilling from one end of the chattering class to the other about his supposed opposition to the great Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is a fact that he stumbled in some of his answers to questions about individual titles of that act. Dr. Paul was not alive when the act was debated in front of the whole country in 1964. He needs to bone up on his history.
But the high tech lynching that is taking place now is of a piece with what the liberal media put Clarence Thomas through in 1991. Because Judge Thomas is an original construction jurist, he was seen as a threat by liberal activists. Because Justice Thomas is black, he is vilified by leftists who believe that all minorities must support their left wing causes.
I have literally no idea what that is supposed to mean ... and it only gets worse, as this is the best "defense" of Paul that Blackwell was able to come up with:
Dr. Paul is an opthalmologist. He is expert on astigmatism. What we can clearly see is the moral astigmatism of the left. For example: As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted not once but repeatedly against giving civil rights protection to newborns who survived abortion attempts. Many of these newborns were black. We know that the abortion license has produced a shockingly disparate impact in the black community. The rate of abortion is 3:1, black-to-white.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the three post-Civil War amendments (along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth) that deserve to be regarded as a Magna Carta for black Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment says that all persons “born in the United States” are citizens of the United States and of the states in which they reside.
This clear intent of the framers did not matter to state senator Obama. He voted against his state’s version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Was Obama hauled before media tribunals to explain his radical position? Not in the least. The liberal media--which views Obama as “a sort of God” (in the words of Newsweek’s Evan Thomas)--not only did not grill him on this shockingly radical position, they actively covered up his voting record.
You can see the moral astigmatism in the premises of all these liberal interrogators of Rand Paul.
Again, what relevance this is supposed to have to the statements made by Paul is utterly beyond me. As is Blackwell's conclusion that "Paul needs to learn history" simply so he can "avoid 'gotcha' journalists like Rachel Maddow" but that he doesn't need to do that by "reading most U.S. history textbooks" which take a "grim and oppressive view" of America's past.
Blackwell then claims that is was "conservative Republicans [who] joined with liberal Democrats to pass the great Civil Rights Act of 1964" (huh?) and that "the liberal media is trying to sandblast Ev Dirksen’s name from the Senate Office Building named for him" (double huh?):
We can’t let them do it. And helping Rand Paul is one way to stop the left from re-writing history.
Normally, when faced with a column full of falsehoods like this, I'd attempt to set the record straight ... but in this case, Blackwell has written a piece so fundamentally incoherent as to make any such effort absolutely impossible.
