CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC'S HARDBALL: Let me finish with this. I would like to salute the country’s number-one Republican whistle-blower: Rand Paul.



You see, you don’t have to agree with libertarianism to see the guts that it takes. It means smashing through all the obligations the right or left applies to government and saying, “Guess what? I’d rather not. I’d rather have no government than what you’re offering here.”



And so, it’s not surprising that the country’s lone libertarian presidential candidate is the one Republican with the courage to call out his party for the disastrous route this government has taken since the weeks after 9/11… When Dick Cheney and the neo-cons found a route to Iraq, a route through the drafty mind of a president, a complicit mainstream media and a public dog-trained to believe whatever a president says about national security.



Just tell me if you ever heard the phrases that sold us into that Iraq war: “W-M-D,” “homeland,” “regime change,” a vocabulary of war, the strange, foreign phrases meant to incur in us some deep need to attack and to hate any country that saw the nuttiness in it. Remember “Freedom fries?” We weren’t supposed to even say “French” fries because that country thought the war talk stupid.



Here we are a dozen years later and still, even now, the Republican party has but one, lone candidate who stands out there being truthful. Rand Paul is like the skinny, quiet, uncool kid who doesn’t get picked for the intramurals because he dares to think for himself.



Well, the Republicans like Bobby Jindal can mock Paul. I think he deserves credit for his guts. His father got whacked by Rudy Giuliani for daring to challenge the stupid, horrid Iraq war. Let’s see if the Republican peanut gallery roars as loud when some dimwit goes after Senator Paul this time.



The war was bad. If the Republicans want the White House the first thing they have to do is confess the horrible decision they made the last time they had it.



Hillary Clinton called her support of the war a mistake. I dearly hope she means it.



Except for Rand Paul, the Republicans haven’t even gotten that far.