Joseph Gerth

@Joe_Gerth

Speaking to Republicans in Southeast Jefferson County, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul likened Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the East and continuously attacked President Barack Obama – all the while ignoring Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, his opponent in November’s election.

During his 43-minute presentation at the Fern Creek Community Association & Chamber of Commerce, Paul said that Clinton’s actions while the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was under attack, means she should “never get within 10 miles of the White House.”

He criticized her for a statement she made last spring in Ohio when she said her administration would put coal miners out of business – a statement she later said was in error – and said Republicans would better serve the coal industry in Washington. And he hammered Clinton for her use of private email while she was secretary of state, and even said he believes she perjured herself under oath when she told him during a committee hearing that she had no knowledge of arms shipments from Libya to Syria.

He opened the speech hitting her on the email scandal, telling the packed room of about 150 people that Clinton had said in a recent press conference that the whole thing was “just a right-wing witch hunt. The press conference had to be ended abruptly when a house fell on her.”

He accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of corruption, saying that Bill Clinton was being paid to speak to groups that had business before his wife’s State Department when she was secretary.

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Paul also criticized Obama over his use of executive authority and called on a House and Senate to check the president’s power, which he said has grown to be 1,000 times as strong as Congress’.

And when one woman accused Obama of treason and trying to implement martial law in the United States, Paul didn’t rebuke her, other than to say, “Well, I don’t know about martial law, but I do know that they … write up contingency plans for things like that and they’re alarming because they talk about things like no congress … now is someone planning and saying we’re going to have martial law? I don’t know that.”

Afterward, Paul said that he believes that Obama has violated the law by use of executive orders but didn’t believe that that rose to the level of treason.

“There’s always a debate over what is constitutional and what’s unconstitutional,” Paul said. “I think that he has acted in unconstitutional ways and that’s the description that I would use. … That’s a different sort of issue and angle than she was talking about.”

During the speech, he called for pulling back on foreign aid, saying, “Frankly, I wouldn’t give one penny to countries that hate us.”

He also called for the government to stop giving money to any country that persecutes Christians. “These people shouldn’t get one penny of our money. We don’t have it to send to them anyway," he said. “It’s outrageous, it ought to stop, it ought to be the first thing we cut.”