TAMPA, Fla. — Ron and Rand Paul continued their quixotic, doomed attempt to bring real diversity to Republican thought at the RNC's off-Broadway opener here at the University of South Florida on Sunday night. Rand started out with his peculiar obsession with the TSA, describing the posture you take for a pat-down with Paulian poetry. "Is this," he asked, "the pose of a free man?" But a moment later, he was making Republican heads explode with an attack on the military: "Republicans have to realize that not every dollar spent on the military is well-spent."

And my personal favorite. "It doesn't say in Beatitudes, 'Blessed are the warmakers.'" Wow. Even a Democrat from Massachusetts wouldn't have the nerve to say that.

Ron Paul himself was a little more cheery and plaintive. "Don't you think if we have a party that says we are a big tent," he suggested to some 10,000 supporters here, "they'd be begging and pleading the young people to get in the tent?"

But he pivoted to a powerful dig with a mention of George Orwell's 1984. "I think a bunch of people read the book and saw it as a business plan to run for Congress!" It did not seem that he was talking about Democrats.

The elder Paul also attacked the Project for the New American Century, which involved folks like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumseld. Into a chorus of boos, Paul said they were still influencing most of the politicians in Washington despite their disaster in Iraq.

He even acknowledged the growing gap in wealth: "Some people ask, Well, haven't we had an accumulation of wealth in the last several decades? Some people have gotten wealthier, the average person hasn't, the middle class is smaller — it's especially smaller in these last five years."

If he could have just brought himself to say four years, they might have let him in the tent. Ron Paul may be the only person in history who destroyed his political career by a sound reading of 1984 (and a reading of Atlas Shrugged).

Paul went on to defend, as he often does, the WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning, comparing him to "Daniel Ellsberg, who told us the truth about Vietnam." He suggested, again, that Julian Assange is being railroaded on false charges.

From there, it was pretty much the Paul greatest-hits collection: his cautious foreign policy, his bold monetary policy, the freedom to drink raw milk and wear hemp and make mistakes about what drugs you want to take. This was a re-tread of a lot of the things we've all seen and heard him say to his following over the past year or so.

Paul did get into an odd tangle on Sunday while attacking the Consumer Protection Bureau for trying to simplify bank loans, which he seemed to mix up with the crash of '98. "The solution is to get government off our backs and out of our wallets," he said But if you've ever taken out a loan and seen the deliberately mystifying jargon they used — I just bought an apartment last year, so the pain is fresh — getting government off our backs is not taking us to the good old days because those were bad old days. So two things an idiot could figure:

A) Government can sometimes help.

B) Ron Paul doesn't know much about this subject (referent confusion deliberate).

One shocking moment came when he mentioned the horrors of the 1930s and lumped the New Deal together with Hitler and Mussolini — shocking because nobody seemed shocked. Wrong crowd. Or very selective patriots.

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