United States Senate candidate Rand Paul, at a press conference in Frankfort, Kentucky. Rand Paul portrait by

Gage Skidmore 12/30/09

Les Payne

May 24, 2010

Far too much is being made of Rand Paul; and at the expense of the greater threat to civil liberties that African-Americans won on paper only during the mid-1960’s.

Granted, the Republican senate nominee from Kentucky would likely vote to roll back the ‘64 legislation that allowed blacks to eat and drink at private restaurants open to the public. And the racist backwardness of nominee Paul should be avoided at all costs--and him along with it.

However, the bedeviling detail in the pursuit of Rand Paul has the media chase making him something of a scapegoat. Driving out this straight-talking libertarian would not get at the more organized, entrenched, white-racist forces bent on “retaking our country” with stealth.

The little-or-no-government Libertarian Party has long enjoyed a kook license to crack its pots in obscurity. It has been dragged out into the light of day now, as Rand Paul’s distaste for federal action--even against state-sanctioned racism--has intersected with the Tea-Party’s drive to make the first black U.S. president the last.

Unable, or unwilling, to expose the Tea Baggers’ racism by euphemisms, the corporate media could not ignore the blunt spoken bigotry of Rand Paul the libertarian.

Even here, it took the counter-cultured Rachel Maddow, of the somewhat irregular MSNBC, to nail Paul with his own words Wednesday night. By the weekend, much of corporate media, including the New York Times, had confirmed in the Tea Party what had been exposed under the smirk and glower of Rachel Maddow.

This racial defect clearly had been a key, motivating factor for Tea baggers all along; and Paul has now gained a foothold in the Republican Party.

Rand Paul told Maddow that he had concerns about the ’64 Civil Rights Act as it applied to private business. “Asked by Ms. Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people,” according to the New York Times, “Mr. Paul replied, ‘yes’” The paper of record wrote that these “views reflect the libertarians philosophy that Mr. Paul and many Tea Party members have embraced.”

Returning to states-rights rule appears to constitute precisely what Tea Party loyalists consider “getting our country back.” And the freaky Rand Paul remains just as insensitive to the barbarism that the pre-1964 system allowed. Their white brethren empowered back then, ran a brutal, undemocratic system that deprived blacks of justice under law, equal protection, liberty, and, yes, even life.  

Alabama law, for example, categorically excluded white female nurses from assignments on wards or rooms in hospitals, either private or public, in which male Negro patients were present. Beer and wine in Georgia were sold under racial exclusivity that did not allow merchants to dispense these spirits to blacks and whites "within the same room at any time."

In Florida, the state had to house white and black juvenile delinquents in separate buildings "not nearer than one-fourth mile to each other." White and black, amateur softball players in Georgia were barred from playing on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of one used by the other race.

Louisiana had a thing about circuses, requiring that before the two races took their separate places under the Big Top; each had to be processed through a separate ticket booth, "with individual sellers," and said booths "shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart."

In these post-Obama days, the Tea Party would likely go beyond denying African-Americans these rights, and zero in on the ’65 Voting Rights Act that gave them the ballot. It was, after all, the exercise of the black vote that got Barack Obama elected president—despite the 55 percent majority of whites who voted against him.

The inability of this white majority to prevent the election of the nation’s first black president has panicked the Tea Party and its Republican host into thinking—quite falsely—that whites have lost their country. Such unpatriotic fanatics, of course, place racial identity over national identity and purpose.  

Just as Paul’s victory exposed the Tea Baggers’ bare-knuckle bigotry, their growing influence within the Republican Party lays bare the racial panic among the white majority that voted overwhelmingly for the goofy Sarah Palin and her pimp-mentor John McCain. (Just imagine this ditzy duo at the helms of the Republic in these trying hours, facing the cataclysmic mess left by the Bush-Cheney Administration.)

While denying Rand Paul a U.S. senate seat strikes a blow for decency, driving him out as a scapegoat only buys time for the cancerous racism spreading unabated within the tissue of the Tea- as well as the Republican Party.

The Clock is ticking.