Rand Paul: Changing Feathers, Now Flying With the Hawks?

The war birds of the Grand Old Party are flying back to their hawks’ nests after a brief interlude from crying havoc to a war-weary public.

The crimes and atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have prompted “a sudden shift in Republican politics, putting a halt to the anti-interventionist mood that had been gaining credence in the party,” the U.S. Armed Forces publication Stars and Stripes noted Thursday, citing a discernible “thirst among many conservative activists for a more muscular U.S. foreign policy.” At a meeting of the Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity over the past weekend, the paper noted, the loudest applause came when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called for bombing the Islamic State “back to the Stone Age.” It’s hard to see how that would deter the rampaging jihadists. They like the Stone Age.

Even Rand Paul, who like Cruz is a likely presidential aspirant for 2016, is now singing from the hawkish hymnal about a U.S. military solution to the chaos in Iraq, a significant shift for the Kentucky senator who has built a reputation as a leading opponent of intervening in conflicts abroad. “If I were president, I would call a joint session of Congress. I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily,” Paul said in a statement released from his office.

FK – Maybe the ‘unmentionables‘ are now telling him what to do.

That last link is a ‘must read.’ In a free country there’s no such thing as a group whose motives can’t be questioned. When you have that, you have a serious problem and an indication of who thinks they own you. As long as this condition persists we are not free here and will not be.