How Rand Paul's civil-rights views escaped media scrutiny

Source: Yahoo News

The editorial board of Louisville's Courier-Journal didn't mince words following its sit-down with Rand Paul last month. Much of what the Republican Senate candidate supports, it wrote, "is repulsive to people in the mainstream," including "an unacceptable view of civil rights."

And yet Paul's view that the federal government should not have the power to force integregation on private businesses — part of 1964's landmark Civil Rights Act — didn't get the attention of the national press until Wednesday, following interviews with NPR's Robert Siegel and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. (Paul subsequently changed his position Thursday after an intense 24 hours of media fallout.)

It's not as if the national media ignored the Kentucky contest. To the contrary, Washington political reporters headed out to cover the horse race — who's up, who's down — and wrote extensively on how the election plays into a larger narrative of tea party candidates like Paul fighting against the GOP establishment.

Somehow lost in all that coverage was any focus on Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, a Lexis-Nexis search for "Rand Paul" and "Civil Rights Act" yields no results for the weeks after the Courier-Journal editorial ran.


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100520/pl_ynews/ynews_pl2167_10

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The amazing thing is that there is some media actually calling the National media for glossing over, and now covering up, Paul's extremist views with respect to the ability of government to prohibit employment discrimination by private businesses.

And it's better for us Dems to have him in the race.

He's used to pontificating with friends in his gated community (oh, I'm just assuming it's gated)that he's never heard a real world reaction.

The Louisville Courier-Journal seems like they did a great job. Strange how their commentary and the whole Civil Rights issue was totally ignored by MSM until the candidate blowed his own self up right on the Tee Vee.

Rand Paul's expression of his political beliefs is being marginalized as a mere gaff akin to John McCain blurting out that illegal immigrants are trying to cause traffic accidents. The truth is that Paul expressed his actual political beliefs, which have been glossed over, are now being characterized as a political slip-up that can conveniently be ignored, rather than a reflection of how extreme his views are.

Those two words don't go together anymore.