In Tuesday’s Rewrite segment, msnbc host Lawrence O’Donnell offered his sympathies to “honest libertarians” after pointing out the weaknesses in recent arguments made by Sen. Rand Paul and former Rep. Ron Paul in response to the Boston Marathon bombing.
“You deserve better spokesmen than Ron and Rand,” O’Donnell said. “But until you get better libertarian advocates, you’re going to have to continue to endure paranoid, lying politicians in the Paul family.”
The Kentucky senator became a target last week after he described a hypothetical situation on Fox Business to justify a drone attack on U.S. soil. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him,” he said.
In addition to “stunning” many libertarians online, O’Donnell said this remark appeared in stark contradiction to a statement Rand Paul made on the Senate floor during his 13-hour filibuster last month, when he said that “no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime.”
“But they shouldn’t have been stunned,” O’Donnell said. “Because as I have pointed out in the space before, inconsistency and lying are Rand Paul trademarks.”
O’Donnell then shifted his focus to an op-ed written by Rand Paul’s father, former Rep. Ron Paul, entitled “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston.” In the piece, the elder Paul criticized authorities’ handling of the manhunt in Boston, lamenting the “forced lock down of a city” and “tanks in the streets.”
But the “forced lockdown” was actually a “shelter in place recommendation,” and the vehicles used in Boston were “about as scary as the armored truck that moves money to and from your bank,” O’Donnell said after presenting a picture of the car. “It is not a tank.”
In response to Paul’s remark that “paramilitary troops” were “terrorizing the public,” O’Donnell then played a clip of residents celebrating in the streets following the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“What a vile lie,” O’Donnell said of Ron Paul’s column. “There was no forced lockdown..there were no tanks and there were no police pointing their weapons at innocent citizens.”
Alexa Keyes