Why Is Senator Aqua Buddha Trolling the War on Drugs?

There are folks who claim there's a case to be made in favor of Rand Paul from a libertarian point of view, but I have had a hard time seeing it. For one thing, "libertarian" has become one of those nebulous labels that means what the people who use it want it to mean. For another, I'm not that sure how libertarian Rand Paul actually is--and by that I don't mean whether he wants to smother Big Government so that men can breathe free(ly of coal dust and who the fuck knows what else they'd put in the air without regulations), because you know he's on board with that. I mean I wonder whether he's in love with the iron glove, babies, and here's why:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has thrown his support behind legislation that Republicans could use to force President Barack Obama to crack down on legal marijuana in states like Colorado and Washington. 

Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, the libertarian-leaning senator said he supported the Enforce the Law Act, which has been approved by the House. The legislation would allow Congress to sue the president for failing to faithfully execute laws.

Now, follow my thinking on this--we have states that are copacetic with personal use of a substance Big Daddy Government is not okay with--and Rand Paul is in favor of a law that says Big Daddy must spank. That doesn't sound so libertarian to me. So what gives?

I'd say he's buying into the narrative that President Obama is some kind of tyrant who just makes up laws as he goes along, which is basically paraphrasing what Sen. Paul says in the article. But the thing of that is--it's bogus. For one thing, part of the reason that some Republicans want to go after Obama has to do with the the idea that he's strategically trying to delay parts of the ACA for political reasons--in other words, they want to force him to implement a law they don't like and many of them want to repeal! But there's a catch--that isn't even tyrannical on his part--it's built-into the law that there will need to be leeway with repects to implementation.  It's a little like the nonsense claim that he's a tyrant because of aaaalll those executive orders that...he doesn't even have, comparable to other presidents. It sounds great to the Obama-hating base--it's just not real-world factual.




So maybe Senator Rand Paul is pandering to the Hates-Obama base, and didn't think through whether this would bring a Big Government Bummer on the heads of folks who just happen to like to spend green to smoke green?

Well, I don't know. You see, the War on Drugs seems to be pretty special to a lot of conservatives. So-called "South Park Republicans" (I think only Andrew Sullivan wanted to make that a thing--but it isn't even really a real thing, is it?) aside, pot-smoking is mostly about hippies and blahs, amirite? And of course, the War on Drugs itself is a legacy of Ronald Reagan, a known freedom fighter in the culture war against the scourge of dope-smoking hippies.  What with their opposition to dumb wars and tendency towards black market entrepreneurship and free speech and other travesties of real Americanism, which is why his Justice Department totally shredded the Fourth Amendment  to...uh. Right. This isn't about my flashbacks to that A-Team episode where steroided-out WWF wrestlers talked to kids about the value of narcing out their parents. Which I was totally drunk when I saw so I may have hallucinated parts of it. Anyhoo, I do know that hippie-bashing remains a solid feature of modern-day Republicanismo. And supporting the drug war has facets related to immigration (strong borders) and law and order (more cops) and so on that play right into a lot of the conservative tropes of yore.

Also, Senator Paul's libertarianism is suspect in more than a few ways. Take his lack of bona fides on bodily autonomy or marriage equality--actually, he's happy to pander to social conservatives when using the jackboot of Big Government to trump the states where abortion or marriage equality are concerned.  So why be surprised if he wants the DEA down the throats of Coloradans?

Remember his big flashy stand against drones? He does not give a shit if they take out a liquor store robber.  Am I amiss in thinking he meant to say "inner-city liquor store robber"?  Yeah. He's just a conservative with a flashy gimmick.  Don't try to read into him, just read him out.