The selling of Senator Aqua Buddha continues apace. Time now has joined the parade, explaining that junior is peddling a superior brand of more easily digestible horsepucky than his old man peddled, and that makes all the difference.

Ron Paul had a mystifying knack for whipping college-age audiences into a frenzy with dry observations about, say, raw milk or Austrian economics. He won a fervent following partly because he didn't much care about winning anything. His son has a different talent. In a few short years in Washington, Rand - who came of age on the libertarian fringe and ran under the Tea Party banner - has become a skillful political salesman, with a feel for marketing his views to match his audience.

Always an important weapon in the arsenal of any bold truth-telling renegade politician.

Fresh off a month that included his electrifying filibuster challenging President Obama's targeted killing policies, a straw poll victory at this month's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and his recent speech unexpectedly urging work permits and legal status for immigrants, Paul was greeted like a conquering hero. "That historic filibuster encouraged everyone that there's still a chance to save America," gushed Paul's introducer...

...paint chips still visible on his lips. Seriously, the filibuster failed, and was "electrifying" only to those people who dropped a fan in the bathtub while listening to it, the CPAC poll is a plebiscite among no-hopers and people in dire need of lives, and, look, he might have changed his mind (a little) on immigration. Maybe he's running for president in 2016. Match that audience, Rand. Match that audience.

And, of course, there is his gift for good, old-fashioned pulled pork.

"To take care of veterans who come home from war, you've going to have to cut waste at the Pentagon and audit the Pentagon," he said. That should include shuttering military bases, he said. "I'm not saying don't have any," he hastened, adding that maintaining a strong national defense was among the signal responsibilities of government. "I'm just saying maybe not 900. I mean, I'd rather have one at Fort Campbell and Fort Knox" - Kentucky installations that offer jobs in his state - "than one in Timbuktu."

There is no question that Aqua Buddha is a superior tap-dancer to his father, but there's also no question that the blog's Five Minute Rule remains in effect regarding the entire Paul family. Whereas, while listening to Papa Ron and his followers, you'd nod along for five minutes and, at the 5:00:01 mark, you'd hear something so stone weird you'd wonder if you'd been dreaming the whole thing. With the younger man, you nod along for five minutes and, at the 5:00:01 mark, you hear something that's so nakedly opportunistic — Benghazi, BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI! — that you wonder if you've accidentally wandered into Sunday dinner at the Romneys.

And it turns out Paul is not opposed to keeping military bases in Iraq, or in that part of the world, for the foreseeable future. When he sat down a few weeks ago with a few reporters at an event hosted by National Review, I brought up a report that morningin The Wall Street Journal about the CIA taking responsibility for U.S. operations in Iraq from the Defense Department, and asked Paul if that was a good model for him, or whether he wanted "total removal" of U.S. forces from the country. Paul said he supported something "in between all that." "I think having some places and bases where we could orchestrate attacks if we had to if there's a regrouping of people wouldn't be too unreasonable. But I think out patrolling the villages after 12 years, the Afghans should be doing that," Paul said. A few minutes later, Paul came back to the issue of closing military bases on foreign soil, and reiterated a middle ground approach. "There are some who want to come completely home. Some want to stay forever. And the answer might be somewhere in the middle that we'll still have bases in places, but we don't necessarily have to maybe have 900 bases. Maybe we have less," he said.

He's a very conservative senator who wants to be president, and who's willing to do almost anything to get there. I can't tell you how much I already miss Crazy Uncle Liberty (!).

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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