Republican senator rails against sequester cuts that ended White House tours but let government to fund a ‘robotic squirrel’

Rand Paul tells conservatives at CPAC 'the GOP of old has grown stale'

The independent-minded Republican senator Rand Paul burnished his reputation with grassroots activists on Tuesday, attacking the "stale and moss-covered" GOP old guard.

Addressing conservative conference goers at the three-day CPAC convention outside Washington DC Paul he called for Republicans brand itself as "the party of jobs and opportunity".

Fresh from his 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor over the appointment of new CIA chief John Brennan, Paul delivered a thinly veiled attack on senior Republicans who attacked him for his stand.

"I was told I got 10 measly minutes, but just in case I came with 13 hours worth of material," he said, holding two sturdy-looking folders aloft.

When the laughs died down, Paul embarked on a wide-ranging critique of the president and the state of the Republican party.

The Kentucky senator took aim at establishment party members: "the GOP of old has grown stale and moss covered. I don't think we need to name any names, do we," he said.

The former presidential candidate John McCain and the veteran South Carolina Lindsey Graham had criticised Paul's filibuster, during which he attacked the Obama administration for failing to be clear about whether it would use drones to kill American civilians. McCain described the effort as a "distortion of the realities of the threats we face".

But Paul stood by his speech. "President Obama says he has no intention of detaining an American citizen without a trial," Paul said, noting that the president also said he "has no intention" of ordering drone strikes on Americans.

"My 13-hour filibuster was a message to the president. Good intentions are not enough," he said.

He went on: "The filibuster was about drones but also about much more. Do we have a Bill of Rights? Do we have a constitution and will we defend it? In his farewell speech in 1989 Reagan said as government expands, liberty contracts. He was right. Government cannot give us our liberty our rights come from our creator."

Paul spoke of the need to "jealously guard all our liberties", repeatedly referencing "the Facebook generation" whose votes the GOP is courting.

"The Facebook generation can detect falseness and hypocrisy a mile away, I know, I have kids. They are the core, though, of the 'leave me alone coalition'," Paul said.

"They want leaders who won't feed them a lot of crap or sell them short. Ask the Facebook generation whether you should put a kid in jail for the nonviolent crime of drug use and you'll hear a no," he said.

One of the most well-received parts of Paul's speech was a lengthy riff on the cancellation of White House tours due to the sequester. "They had to do this because these cuts were imposed by the sequester, but meanwhile the president finds $250m to send to Egypt," Paul noted, to loud boos.

"I say not one penny more to countries that are burning our flag," he suggested, to equally loud applause.

But Paul had other savings measures lined up too. "Does it really take $3m to discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth?" he mused, in reference to what he asserted was a government study into the effects of meth on monkeys.

Paul said the government was keen to spend $300,000 on a "robotic squirrel", explaining: "They wanted to discover whether a squirrel that doesn't wag its tail could be bitten by a rattlesnake."

"Mr President, maybe we could have cut the robotic squirrel before we went to White House tours," he concluded.