Rand Paul Reads History, Likes Bands That Were Big When He Was a Teenager, Must Be Some Crazy Blame-America-Firster

Jennifer Rubin, whose blog at The Washington
Post serves as a sort of dumping ground for undigested
neoconservative talking points,
claimed on Sunday that Rand Paul “blamed the U.S. for
WWII.” In 2012, you see, Paul suggested that the punitive measures
imposed on Germany after World War I helped fuel the resentments
Hitler exploited in his rise to power. (The senator specifically
cited the Allies’ Naval blockade, which extended past the armistace
into the middle of 1919.) Paul further offended
Rubin by raising the possibility that the emargoes imposed on
Japan before World War II played a role in the run-up to Pearl
Harbor. Rubin quotes a couple of her acquaintances who think these
are very bad things to say (including “a foreign policy
expert at a center-left think tank,” who apparently needed
anonymity to tell us that Paul represents the “unreconstructed
Taft-Lindbergh-Buchanan wing of [the] party”) before citing

Jeane Kirkpatrick‘s old line, “But then, somehow, they always
blame America first.” She caps off her post with the
boldfaced, italicized question, What else is out
there?

Needless to say, Paul’s comments are well within the boundaries
of mainstream historical debate, and none of them add up to blaming
Washington for the Second World War. (One of the policies he
criticized—the blockade of Germany—wasn’t even really an American
project.) Given that his statements came in the context of
defending his vote for sanctions on Iran, I’d say the overall
thrust of his remarks was, if anything, too hawkish rather than too
dovish. There’s no need for me to belabor this; Rubin’s post is
interesting not as a serious critique but as a bellwether. The rise
of a relatively anti-interventionist camp in the Republican Party
is driving the hawks crazy.

In that spirit, let’s move on to that closing question:
What else is out there? Believe it or
not, March’s most ludicrous attack on Rand Paul from the right was
not Rubin’s post this past weekend. It was
this bit from Powerline‘s John Hinderaker, reacting
with alarm to the fact that Paul’s speech at CPAC included a line
from a Pink Floyd song:

To me, it seems extremely odd that Rand
Paul would single out a Roger Waters lyric from the 1970s in a
speech that otherwise quoted classic American heroes. Was Paul’s
admiring reference to Waters intended as a proverbial dog whistle
to let listeners know that he hasn’t diverged too far from his
father’s foreign policy views? Or was his decision to highlight
Waters simply a random (albeit odd) choice made by a politician who
is unaware that Waters, in recent years, has come to stand for an
obsessive hatred of Israel?

Yeah: Why else would a man born in 1963 quote a Pink
Floyd lyric, if not as an anti-Zionist dog-whistle? Get on this,
Rubin!