All credit goes to Think Progress for doing their homework. I'm just the messenger for the Kos community. In 2006, the KY governor was fighting off charges of offering state jobs to political supporters. Eventually, the governor, Ernie Fletcher agreed to a plea after being indicted by a state grand jury in which he conceded wrong doing in his administration in exchange for the charges being dropped.
Rand Paul penned his own solution to the hypothetical scenario befalling him, which entails, uh... pardoning himself.
Which gets me back to my daydream. What would I do if I were governor?
First, I’d have pardoned myself and everyone included nearly a year ago. Without a pardon the case goes on and on. Fletcher has gotten no kudos whatsoever for not pardoning himself.
This is not a joke.
It seems this is part of a meme that's coalescing around the Paul campaign: "I hate government except for when it provides me a comfortable living!" First, it was railing against government involvement in our personal lives while simultaneously collecting approximately half of his income from from Medicare and Medicaid.
But Paul's campaign confirmed that he receives far more funding from Medicare than Medicaid, and roughly half of his medical income comes from the two programs.
Now it's the abuse of the power to pardon, which betrays his ignorance of what it means to an accountable public servant in the eyes of Kentucky's citizenry.
This is the essence of the Tea Party movement right here: the acceptance of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the role of government. We've seen it in their rhetoric and their political positions.
All Rand Paul has done is implicitly concede that he'd incorporate this cognitive dissonance into his own personal lifestyle and philosophy of governance. But in this case, it would be to the detriment of the people he would be elected to serve.
A donation to Jack Conway in the Senator for Kentucky race looks really good right now, right?