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Sen. Rand Paul disgraced himself on CNN today by mocking President Obama’s NSA speech in a way that proved that he never bothered to actually watch the speech itself.

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Sen. Paul was full of pre-prepared lines about the president’s NSA speech that contradicted what the president said.

On CNN, Paul claimed that the president said, “Well, what I think I heard was that if you like your privacy, you can keep it.vBut in the meantime, we’re going to keep collecting your phone records, your e-mails, your text messages, and likely your credit card information. I heard that, ‘Trust me, I’m going put some more safeguards in place, but I’m going to keep right on collecting every Americans’ records.'”

President Obama said the exact opposite of trust me, “But all of us understand that the standards for government surveillance must be higher. Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us. We won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power. It depends on the law to constrain those in power.”

The president announced that he is ending the collection of bulk meta phone data, “For all these reasons, I believe we need a new approach. I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.”

It really obvious that Rand Paul didn’t watch or read a transcript of the president’s speech before he went on CNN to criticize it. To Paul, it didn’t matter what Obama said. Sen. Paul is using the NSA issue to appeal to members of the far left to back his presidential campaign. He was never going to agree with anything that the president said because his presidential campaign is riding on the publicity generated from his class action lawsuit stunt.

Paul is playing people who care about privacy and the Patriot Act for fools. The Kentucky senator has consistently talked out of both sides of his mouth. He is concerned about the privacy of the American people, but he has willingly thrown Edward Snowden under the bus to appeal to the Republican establishment.

Rand Paul is a complete fraud. He is trying to mouth his father’s talking points while also being a mainstream Republican. Paul doesn’t care about the Patriot Act. Paul is mocking issues that he doesn’t understand, or pay attention to. He is the kind of empty Republican candidate that someone like Hillary Clinton would wipe the floor with in 2016.

Sen. Paul isn’t just an ambitious intellectually disinterested political opportunist. He is the kind of man that if elected would be an unfit danger to the presidency and the country.