Ron and Rand at the Republican Convention

Ron and Rand Paul continued their quixotic, doomed attempt to bring real diversity to Republican thought at the RNC's off-Broadway opener here at the University of South Florida on Sunday night. Rand started out with his peculiar obsession with the TSA, describing the posture you take for a pat-down with Paulian poetry. “Is this," he asked, "the pose of a free man?” But a moment later, he was making Republican heads explode with an attack on the military: “Republicans have to realize that not every dollar spent on the military is well-spent.”

And my personal favorite. "It doesn't say in Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the warmakers.'" Wow. Even a Democrat from Massachusetts wouldn't have the nerve to say that.

Ron Paul himself was a little more cheery and plaintive. "Don't you think if we have a party that says we are a big tent," he suggested to some 10,000 supporters here, "they'd be begging and pleading the young people to get in the tent?" But he pivoted to a powerful dig with a mention of George Orwell's 1984. "I think a bunch of people read the book and saw it as a business plan to run for Congress!" It did not seem that he was talking about Democrats.

The elder Paul also attacked the Project for the New American Century, which involved folks like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumseld.

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He even acknowledged the growing gap in wealth: "Some people ask, Well, haven't we had an accumulation of wealth in the last several decades? Some people have gotten wealthier, the average person hasn't, the middle class is smaller — it's especially smaller in these last five years."

If he could have just brought himself to say four years, they might have let him in the tent.

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Paul went on to defend, as he often does, the WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning, comparing him to "Daniel Ellsberg, who told us the truth about Vietnam." He suggested, again, that Julian Assange is being railroaded on false charges.

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Wrong crowd.
  Charlie Pierce