Many news stories are dancing around it, but the bottom line is that Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, considered by some pundits to be a major contender for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, is suggesting Republicans go after Hillary Clinton if she’s the Democratic nominee by making Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky a campaign issue.

He said it in a way to give himself wiggle room, but even a head of red cabbage on the shelf at Vons Grocery in Rancho Penasquitos could read his words and see what he’s suggesting. It’s raising the Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern 20 years ago and trying to use it as a political bludgeon.

The big question: is James Carville his campaign adviser?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested Sunday that the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal should give Americans pause when it comes to evaluating the Clinton legacy — and, by extension, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential presidential campaign. Paul’s wife, Kelley, made similar remarks in a Vogue profile last year, and her husband agreed with her Sunday in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Rand Paul said the scandal is about more than just infidelity and lying to the American people, but also as “predatory behavior” from the former president. “One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office,” Paul said. “And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and it is predatory behavior.”

if you think that was just a slip of the tongue, he later said “sometimes it’s hard to separate” Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Using that standard — in all seriousness — then wouldn’t it stand to reason that it would be perfectly legitimate for Democrats to suggest Rand Paul is anti-Semitic due to the many charges over the years that the older Paul is either anti-Semitic or tone deaf in his ties to people who showed either hatred of Jews or denied the Holocaust? (Just START HERE and read through this list of stories.)

But, apart from that, Rand Paul’s comment will be seen by many as an insult to women – suggesting that a woman who served as Senator and then served as Secretary of State should be considered damaged goods for the Oval Office because her husband had an affair 20 years ago.

Paul is also giving a signal of the kind of campaign he’d likely run.

To many libertarians, he is a major hope: for once, they feel, they’ll get candidate who reflects the IDEAS of the libertarian-oriented wing of the Republican Party.

His comments suggest that instead once again Americans would see a politician who is supposedly a person of ideas morph into just one more hack politico who seems to be auditioning for talk radio host as he grabs onto and whatever he thinks can be used negatively about another candidate — because it’s much harder to get votes if you base your campaign on a battle of i-d-e-a-s.

Charles Johnson puts it this way:

The recent Republican National Committee meeting got all the conservative politicians fired up about proving they’re not conducting a war on women’s rights, so they promptly went out to the media and shot themselves in the foot, over and over, proving beyond all doubt that they’re still living in the Stone Age. The latest Republican to beclown himself: Rand Paul, who went on Meet the Press today and announced that he thinks a good way to attack Hillary Clinton would be to bring up her husband’s infidelity from 20 years ago.

Libertarians who were saying Paul would be a forward looking candidate if he ran must be quite embarrassed right now.

P.S. Will talking about how the Clintons “killed” Vince Foster be far behind?

graphic via shutterstock.com