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Like with his father, Ron Paul, it’s easy to often find yourself saying “did he really just say that” when listening to Rand Paul speak.

Last year, fellow Libertarian Ron Paul was taped talking about how the CIA runs the military, the federal reserve, pretty much the whole country.   He’s been an outspoken proponent of eliminating the IRS, along with the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and FEMA to name a few.

The elder Paul also believes in a non-interventionist policy, possibly an isolationist one, and would close all US basis on foreign soil and bring all US troops back on to American soil.

When it comes to Rand Paul, we don’t know nearly as much as we do about Ron.  We know that he has also spoken of eliminating the Department of Education and the Federal reserve.  He’s in favor of closing GITMO and doesn’t believe terrorists should be tried in military tribunals.  Beyond that, we only have bits and pieces of what Rand believes, but it seems that he parallels his father’s positions in many areas.

The problem with Ron, and it appears Rand, is that while they often have a constitutional basis for their positions, when they voice them, they sometimes, for lack of a better word, come off a bit ‘wacko’.

In a recent interview with Rachel Madow, he allowed himself to get trapped.  The Talking Points Memo explains what he meant while appearing to oppose the civil rights act:

“Well, there’s 10 — there’s 10 different — there’s 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions and I’m absolutely in favor of,” he told Maddow deep in their 15-minute interview. “One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.”

Got that? Rand Paul agrees with most of the Civil Rights Act, but not the part that deals with private businesses. And he won’t say whether or not that one part of the bill would have been a deal-breaker if he had been in Congress when the bill was up for a vote.

That’s it, essentially. Paul said many, many times in the interview with Maddow that he is not a racist, and that his motivation for saying what he’s saying about the civil rights act is not race, but rather allowing business owners their right to “free speech,” which in this case is the freedom to discriminate.

“Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?” Paul told Maddow. “I don’t want to be associated with those people, but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn’t mean we approve of it.”

When it comes to spending taxpayer dollars, Paul says he is all for laws requiring equal accommodation for everybody.

This is classic Paul, whether Ron or Rand.  They have very strong convictions about individual and state’s rights, and when expressing those convictions you never know what exactly might come out of their mouth.

J.E. Dyer of the Optimistic Conservative wrote on Hot Air about the contrarian, Libertarian Rand Paul and two recent incidents that might haunt Paul between now and November:

There have been two incidents now, since the Kentucky primary, in which Rand Paul has failed to prostrate himself automatically before a political shibboleth.  One concerned the Civil Rights Act, the intent of which Paul has expressed full support for.  His quarrel is with the element of the Civil Rights Act that authorizes the federal government to regulate private businesses.

The other is Paul’s criticism of Obama’s “boot on the neck” comment about BP, and of the general societal attitude in the US that everything must be litigated and litigable fault assigned for any bad thing that happens.

The question we are left with is whether Rand Paul is going to be a blessing or a curse for the Tea Party.  After winning his primary battle, he quickly proclaimed it a victory for the Tea Party.  But, is it?  The Tea Party movement is already demonized by the main stream media.  More times than not, with outrageous assertions, if not out right lies.  When a self-proclaimed communist flies a plane into an IRS building, the headlines read “will unstable man’s attempt to destroy an IRS building spell doom for the Tea Party.”  The fact that there was no ties between the Tea Party and the left-wing whack job was irrelevant, because it was an opportunity to demonize the movement.

Now with Rand Paul being the new ‘face’ of the Tea Party candidate, every word he utters, every position he takes, every non-populist view he espouses will be tied to the Tea Party.

Blessing or Curse?  While it will take months to know for sure, there is one thing we can be sure of and that is that the main stream media will use every misstep that Rand Paul makes as chance to tear town the Tea Party movement.

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