Even considering the rapid dumb-ening of the party at the hands of Fox News, it continues to be a wee bit shocking how quickly nearly every lawmaker in the Republican Party has fallen in line to support Trump's every whim, tantrum, lie, insult, and fever dream. It is not that any of us are surprised to learn that top national "conservatives" are both ideological frauds and, more to the point, bad people; that has been evident and incessantly proven, for anyone bothering to look, for approximately forever.
But at the least, many of us thought, a great many Republican lawmakers would themselves be ambitious enough to eagerly kneecap any of their fellows who went completely and utterly 'round the bend. Or, say, were exposed as child molesters or rapists, or tax-dodgers or bank-defrauders or money launderers or justice-obstructors. Or just committed the nasty sin of saying the quiet parts out loud often enough to botch decades of Republican insistence that "the real racists" were Not Them. Surely arrogant self-promotion, and self-protection, would render it difficult for top Republicans to crawl on their bellies for the sake of a buffoonish, incompetent nobody with the social skills of a cassowary.
To wit: We've known for a while that supposed libertarian of principle Rand Paul, as current example, was a two-bit huckster whose policy statements were based on opportunistic fundraising pitches rather than any sense of consistency. Whatever he was before, though, has been scribbled out in favor of becoming Generic Republican Yes Man who exists to seek Trump's favor. He and fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham no doubt compete on the golf course to see who can put themselves farthest under Trump's cleats.
Why else would Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, supposed libertarian of courage, turn himself into a Speak-n-Spell for Trump talking points even as Trump angrily drifts farther and farther into explicit racism? Why jump onto the "Send Her Back" bandwagon even as Republican strategists beg their charges to steer around it?
"I'm not saying we forcibly send [Rep. Ilhan Omar] anywhere," Senator Toady riffed to the white nationalism-promoting Breitbart News. But "I’m willing to contribute to buy her a ticket to go visit Somalia. I think she can look and maybe learn a little bit about the disaster that is Somalia."
This would allow Omar, a Somalian refugee whose life has been impacted by the multiple catastrophes of Somalia infinitely more than Sen. Rand Paul has been impacted by anything other than yard disputes with his neighbors, to properly value America, his premise went. And it's the sort of dribbling mimicry of Trump's own insult that really ought to be so deeply humiliating to the speaker that they want to crawl into a box and die, rather than act as Trumpian accomplice, but no. No, Rand Paul does not appear to resent having to scrape around in the Breitbartian nationalism swamp in bids to curry favor with a jackass. The man looks, as does every one of his colleagues, born for the part.
Wags have pointed out that as a libertarian paradise—few regulations, a barely-extant government, and a truly "free" market in which gun-laden entrepreneurs are free to establish themselves by tooth and claw—Somalia seems a place littered with lessons for Paul himself, if he cared to stroll through on his own learning expedition. But that presumes Paul's "libertarianism" was ever anything more than a cheap ruse to gain his father's mailing lists; that act was dropped as soon as Paul was assigned a Senate desk and office.
It's the spinelessness that's the most eyebrow-raising. The absolute cowardice. Trump aimed a specious tantrum at an immigrant congresswoman; Rand Paul seizes it, shoves it up his behind, and pops it out his own mouth in an attempt to endear himself to Dear Leader. The man, like so many of his colleagues, is a poodle.
And Paul is a racist himself, for backing the racist insistence that non-white Americans like Omar are not allowed to criticize America even as Paul and Trump and Graham and every last book-writer and grifter of the conservative moment blasts the sorry state of the nation in speeches and scribbles and fundraising letters, calling it “in decay” or “doomed” or “crumbling” or whatever adjectives will best pry cash out of the favorite conservative marks: elderly Fox-watching paranoids. Critiquing America's faults is what Rand Paul had premised his whole truncated career on, before he chose to be another man's lapdog. What he means is that Omar is not white, and is therefore not allowed to do the same.