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" CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE. All right, I&amp;#039;m as bad as the rest of them, as bad as the Danish cameraman, and the eight odd reporters, and the people working in the four satellite trucks out in the parking lot of the Grappone Convention Center here last night. At least the 500-odd Republicans who gathered to hear Rand Paul\u2014and his warm-up act, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, who mysteriously remains chairman of the Republican National Committee\u2014paid for the privilege of luxuriating in the embryonic stages of a presidential campaign that&amp;#039;s still at least two years away. What was the excuse for the rest of us? It&amp;#039;s a terrible sort of self-knowledge, let me tell you that. The occasion was the New Hampshire GOP&amp;#039;s First Annual &amp;quot;Liberty Dinner,&amp;quot; and, if there&amp;#039;s one thing we know about American politics in 2013, it&amp;#039;s that the First Annual anything is nothing more than an occasion to raise money, which the First Annual Liberty Dinner was. (In fact, Senator Aqua Buddha himself gave the state party 10-grand, which seems just a bit hinky but, in the modern era of How Things Are Done, it probably doesn&amp;#039;t even raise an eyebrow.) Nevertheless, it also was a chance to get an early glimpse of what the next Republican campaign is going to be like. For that, before we look at Senator Aqua Buddha, we must consider the person who preceded him to the podium. And lord above, what a pipsqueak Reince Priebus is. (He should probably learn to promounce Kelly Ayotte&amp;#039;s name, too, at least for the moment,) He spent five minutes talking about the administration&amp;#039;s contempt for the Constitution. &amp;quot;A president that touts ego, power, and a hatred for dissent above everything else, that&amp;#039;s Barack Obama, that&amp;#039;s the leader of this country. I don&amp;#039;t think this administration realizes that the First Amendment wasn&amp;#039;t a suggestion. The Bill of Rights is not a wish list, it&amp;#039;s a set of non-negotiable limits on the federal government.&amp;quot;  He thereupon ripped Eric Holder for wanting to read Miranda rights to the Christmas Day bomber and to Osama bin Laden (?). It&amp;#039;s all just conjuring and code words but, between the lines, there was a clear indication that the 2016 Republican presidential campaign is going to be a tangled ball of seething resentment and unbridled victimology. The whining and poor-mouthing is going to be audible on Mars as the party staggers, blinking, out of the mental moonscape into which eight years of radical Kenyan Muslim socialism has placed it. It is going to be a party of petty grievance in full battle dress, of bitter recrimination cast in marble. A party full of Reince Priebuses. (Priebi? Prieba?) That is not going to be a pretty thing to watch. I think my favorite moment, other than when he talked about how glad he was to be in a party &amp;quot;that prays before dinner,&amp;quot; came at the end when he talked about how he&amp;#039;s simply not going to stand for any further abuse from...debate moderators. &amp;quot;We cannot any more allow moderators who are in the business of making news make that news at the expense of our party and our candidates. It&amp;#039;s over. We&amp;#039;re done,&amp;quot; he squeaked. And they all applauded. No more would the party of freedom and liberty submit to the jackbooted bullying of Candy Crowley and the rest of those tyrants who made it their business in 2012 to help the incredible Clown Car that was the Republican primary field look foolish. Not any more, by god. Not with Reince Priebus at the helm. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re done with having Anderson Cooper and George Stephanopoulos depose our candidates in front of national TV.&amp;quot; More whooping and hollering. God knoweth why. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re trying to protect the candidates, and the nominees, and the things that we believe in, and the things that we&amp;#039;re celebrating tonight.&amp;quot; Freedom and liberty and the eternal principles of the American Dream must forever be guarded from encroachments by...Anderson Cooper? But, to his credit, and for the most part, Aqua Buddha danced away from a tone of perpetual grievance. Oh, he patted his own back about his bold 13-hour filibuster\u2014Although he did recall a young man &amp;quot;who summed up what I said in three words\u2014&amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t drone me, bro.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Oops.\u2014and he thumped himself even harder over his bold stand against Hillary Clinton who, once again, wherever she was last night, must have heard a faint buzzing in her ear. And the blog&amp;#039;s Five Minute Rule about politicians from the Paul family once again was vigorously applied when he started in on constitutional history. He pretty much bungled James Madison&amp;#039;s famous formulation about government and men and angels and, if you&amp;#039;re going to defend the Constitution as written in Philadelphia, you a) shouldn&amp;#039;t cite Patrick Henry as much as Paul does, since that&amp;#039;s rather like citing Andrew Mellon in defense of the SEC, and b) shouldn&amp;#039;t summon up the modern Christianist trope that the First Amendment is not to protect government from religion, it&amp;#039;s to protect religion from government, not if you&amp;#039;re going to drop Mr. Madison&amp;#039;s name loosely, anyway.  However, and this is going to be worth watching down the road\u2014and, yes, I am aware that it&amp;#039;s a very looooonnnng road at this point\u2014he is making an interesting stab at detaching civil liberties rhetoric from the talk about economic liberty, which happens to be the dilemma from which Paul Ryan, to name one Republican, cannot seem to escape. Ryan keeps talking about how constitutional freedoms and economic liberty are inextricable bound up with one another, and then keeps proposing policies that favor an economic oligarchy that is traditionally the enemy of political freedom. Paul seems at this point to believe that political freedom exists independently, and that both act in tandem, and not as two parts of the same whole. The poor man has the same political freedom as the rich man does. Economic liberty is not the source of political freedom. It is an outgrowth of it, and not the other way around. This may give him enough room to sell to a room full of woodchuck plutocrats his vision of a half-funkyRepublican party. &amp;quot;If you want to be the party of white people, we&amp;#039;re winning all the white vote,&amp;quot; Paul said. &amp;quot;But we are a diverse nation. We are going to win when we look like America, we need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with ponytails, without ponytails, with beards, without beards. We need to look like the rest of America.&amp;quot;  They did not applaud as loudly for this as they did for the counterassault on the totalitarians at the anchor desks, but they listened. &amp;quot;I had dinner with his father once,&amp;quot; said Ray Wieczorek, a former mayor of Manchester. &amp;quot;And I agreed with 85 percent of what his father said. But that 15 percent was way out there. I think the son is a little more moderate, there&amp;#039;s a little less of an edge to what he says.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22686/the-rand-paul-show-opens/>