Excerpted from Bill Bonner's "We Salute You, Rand Paul" via Bonner & Partners [5],
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You can divide Congress into two groups: the fools, who are just not clever enough to understand what is going on, and the knaves, who are too clever by half.
Between them, the cronies have a field day… duping the former and conniving with the latter.
Rand Paul’s father, Ron, never fit into either group. Maybe Rand doesn’t fit either…
Ron Paul couldn’t be bought. And he was smart enough to see that the do-gooders weren’t doing any good – except for themselves.
If we had a beef with Ron, it was that he lacked cynicism. We often wanted to ask: What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?
It was as though he didn’t see the sordid scenes going on around him… and wouldn’t stoop to notice the sleazy motives of his fellow representatives.
He was always for liberty and the Constitution… and that was it. It was as though he thought he had been elected to defend the liberty of his constituent voters.
What they really wanted was something else – power, status, and other people’s money. But Ron ignored it… like one ignores the character flaws of an old friend… and continued on his lonely mission.
Surely, Rand must have learned from watching his father.
But what?
He grew up in a political world – full of stuffed shirts and empty heads.
Did he learn how to work with this crumbly, second-rate clay and shape it into the world he and his father wanted? Or did he learn how to get along by going along… and maybe become more successful, at least in Washington’s terms, than his father?
A Bogus Threat
We had our doubts. It seemed as though the apple had fallen… and then rolled far from the tree. But then, this past weekend, despite howls of protest, Rand did his father’s work.
The Patriot Act was an embarrassment from the get-go. How could a people who valued their liberty give it up so readily?
The terrorist threat was gaudy and spectacular, but never serious.
Statistically, we Americans are more likely to be killed by our own children than by terrorists. We are more likely to starve to death. Or die after tripping over furniture.
[6]
And for every American killed by a terrorist, there are about 100 who are gunned down, run over, or Tasered to death by their own police.
Still, eavesdropping was sold to the public as a way to head off terrorist attacks.
How many attacks did it thwart?
Zero.
The Washington Times reports:
FBI agents can’t point to any major terrorism cases they’ve cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law operating.
Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations.
So we salute Rand Paul. Good on you. In the long march to a police state, the feds were forced to take a small step back.
This example made us think about other people doing good work. (Who says we are always negative!)
There are millions and millions of people who do good work every day. Few of them get their names in the paper. They clean their homes. They drive trucks and analyze stocks. They weld steel and teach children.
