Rand Paul in Berkeley

This week in left/right/libertarian convergence: Sen. Rand Paul
visits Berkeley. The San Francisco Chronicle
reports:

Cheered by a youthful audience
in one of the country’s most liberal enclaves, Sen. Rand Paul – one
of the Republican Party’s leading contenders for the White House in
2016 – delivered a scathing rebuke to the U.S. intelligence
community Wednesday, calling it “drunk with power.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m worried,” the Kentucky senator
told 400 people who filled a hall at UC Berkeley’s International
House. “If the CIA is spying on Congress, who exactly can or will
stop them?”

Paul’s comments come one week after Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
D-Calif., took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of illegal
computer searches intended to hinder her Intelligence Committee’s
probe of alleged U.S. torture of terrorism suspects.

Paul said Feinstein’s allegations had shaken Washington. “I look
into the eyes of senators and I think I see real fear,” he said. “I
think I perceive fear of an intelligence community drunk with
power, unrepentant and uninclined to relinquish power.”

He said he had told Feinstein, “‘Great speech, everybody is talking
about it.’ I hope she will stand up, not let the CIA push her
around, not let the NSA push her around.”

For more coverage, read the San Jose Mercury
News
here and the Washington Post
here. At different points in his speech, the papers report,
Paul said the GOP should expand its tent on social issues, called
for a new Church Committee to investigate the national security
sate, threw in a reference to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451, and suggested, in a line that I suspect we’ll be
hearing more about, that it’s “ironic that the first
African-American president has without compunction allowed this
vast exercise of raw power by the NSA,” given the government’s
surveillance of the civil rights movement.