Not Long ago, Rand Paul embarrassed himself and his party with a condescending attempt to paint the GOP as attractive to Latinos. Yesterday he was outright insulting, when he embarrassed himself and his party to black students at Howard University. Republican minority outreach has one problem. To succeed, Republicans must convince minority communities that obviously racist GOP policy is not at all racist.

So now we know the basis of Kentucky's libertarian Sen. Rand Paul's strategy for expanding the Republican Party's appeal to African Americans: amnesia. That's the only conclusion I can reach after watching the C-SPAN broadcast of Paul's 52-minute appearance today at Howard University. He deserves credit for appearing before a potentially hostile audience to make the case for conservative policies with which most black voters utterly disagree. But he also deserves strong criticism — even derision — for pretending that there's any mystery about why most black folks are so skeptical about the GOP. He wants us to forget the party's recent history — and his own. So in his speech today, he asked, "How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?" He went on to argue that blacks began to switch their long-standing allegiance from Republicans to Democrats during the Great Depression. "The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance, while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible: the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets," Paul argued… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <The Root>

Rand seems to think that he gets to make up a history different from what actually happened. He insulted black people by accusing them of moving to the Democrats during the great depression, because they prefer welfare to opportunity. Horse feathers shit! The Republican Party came to be as the progressive party that freed the slaves and, after the war, fought for their equality. The Southern Democrats, aka Dixiecrats, were the racists that opposed them. In the 1960s, Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans combined to pass the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Acts. In a play for political power, the Republicans adopted the Southern Strategy, in which they adopted the Dixiecrats racist policies. The Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party and became its base. Until that time, black people were overwhelmingly Republican. Only after the Republican Party adopted racism as policy did the majority of black people change their support to the Democrats. That's what really happened. Idiot, son of Idiot, named after Idiot spread more BS than an agricultural spreader.

Rachel Maddow demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, that Rand Paul also lied when he claimed he has never been against the Civil Rights Act.

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Like his racist father, Paul has said he believes that businesses have the right to racist discrimination.