The Tea Party's Rand Paul Disaster

From The Washington Post -- May 16, 2012:

Rand Paul’s cynical budget

By Dana Milbank

“Call me cynical,but I wasn’t sure his views on marriage could get any gayer,” Sen. Rand Paul said of President Obama.

Okay, let’s call Rand Paul cynical — but not because of his playground taunt of the president a few days ago at a gathering of religious conservatives in Iowa. Let’s call him cynical because of the monstrous proposal the Kentucky Republican offered on the Senate floor Wednesday.

The tea party darling’s plan would, among other things, cut the average Social Security recipient’s benefits by nearly 40 percent, reduce defense spending by nearly $100 billion below a level the Pentagon calls “devastating,” and end the current Medicare program in two years — even for current recipients, according to the Senate Budget Committee staff. It would eliminate the education, energy, housing and commerce departments, decimate homeland security, eviscerate programs for the poor, and give the wealthy a bonanza by reducing tax rates to 17 percent and eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends.

It is, all in all, quite a nasty piece of work, and even an intervention by the Aqua Buddha wouldn’t get it through the Senate. It failed, 83 to 16. Yet the very fact that such a proposal would be seriously debated on the chamber floor shows that a troubling number of lawmakers have gone off the deep end.