Rand Paul, cartoon villain
by David Atkins
United States Senator Rand Paul:
Instead of punishing them, you should want to encourage them. I would think you would want to say to the oil companies, “What obstacles are there to you making more money?” And hiring more people. Instead they say, “No, we must punish them. We must tax them more to make things fair.” This whole thing about fairness is so misguided and gotten out of hand...
“We as a society need to glorify those who make a profit,” Paul concluded.
Recall that this is the same Rand Paul who said that criticism of BP after it drowned the Gulf coast in oil sounded "really unAmerican."
Think Progress has done a great job deconstructing everything wrong with Paul's statement: every dollar "earned" by oil companies is money extracted from consumers' pockets; the oil industry doesn't actually employ that many people, and almost half of the people it does employ earn minimum wage; oil companies are already making insane profits while paying pathetically low tax rates, even as they use their incredible profits to lay off their workforce. And that's not even getting into the issue of climate change.
But the fact that anyone has to even compile these arguments is silly. There was a day not too long ago when no United States politician would have even dared to utter those words. There was a day when no screenwriter would have written those words for a screen villain because it would sound too preposterous, like something only a cardboard character of greed and corruption would say. Rand Paul sounds like the heavy from a story written by a nine year old kid, with no sense of the sophistication taken by actual real-life villains to make their selfish rationales more palatable to the public.
And yet, here we are. Not only is this man a United States Senator but his father is running for the highest office in the land, even as (if media reports are to be believed) there may be a deal in the works to make him second-in-line to the presidency right below a job-killing vulture capitalist.
We take these things for granted in some bewilderment because we happen to be living through them. But if you had run this scenario by any Hollywood screenwriter 20 years ago as a story for a political drama set in the near future, they'd have told you to come back with a more credible storyline.
A mania has taken hold of a significant part of this country, and I'm not sure how it resolves with the nation in one piece, or even peacefully. One of America's two political parties is quite literally being run by unabashed stock cartoon villains, while the other is desperately trying to compromise with them to no avail.
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