Random CPAC Observations: Rand Paul and Marco Rubio Are Two Sides of a Double-Tailed Coin:
1. If you're going to be so anti-GLBT that your chair doesn't even want to hear about anything pro, then perhaps you don't want to hold your Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort. Just sayin' that you maybe want to avoid the easy jokes. Like simply mentioning "CPAC" and "Gaylord" in the same sentence. It's beneath all of us to make that joke.

2. All of the supposedly profound things that Senator Marco Rubio said at CPAC are utterly illogical bullshit. For instance:

-- "Just because I believe that states should have the right to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot." Um, the Rude Pundit is pretty sure that the according-to-Webster definition of "bigot" would be someone who wants to prevent some people from having the same rights as others just because that someone is intolerant of those people.

-- "[T]he people who are actually close-minded in American politics are the people that love to preach about the certainty of science in regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception." We can argue science and ethics, but, fuck, why bother when you can demolish this argument by inverting it: "People who say that science has proven life begins at conception are close-minded if they don't believe the absolute facts of climate change." Good for the gander, motherfuckers.

-- "[W]e need a health care reform, but not a health care reform that injects the federal government in a takeover of the world's highest- quality health care industry, but a health care reform that empowers Americans so they can buy health insurance from any company in America that's willing to sell it to them." That last phrase there is the key, no? "Any company...that's willing to sell it to them"? What the fuck does that mean? Sell it to them at an extraordinary price, if at all, because of a pre-existing condition?

3. Rubio is the shittiest storyteller. He regaled the crowd thusly: "There's this couple that I know. They're on my son's tackle football team. He's 7 years old. Their son is 8 years old. This is a couple. They're married. She works as a receptionist, at a dental office, I think, a medical office. He loads boxes from trucks at a warehouse. I don't have to tell you they're struggling. They live in a little small apartment. They share one car. They want -- they're not freeloaders. They're not liberals." Yeah, yeah, ha-ha, on that last line, boy, you got us. Anyways, what is the point of this story? Rubio doesn't say if they're receiving any government assistance (although one can assume that the son goes to public school and that Mom's medical office gets more than a little of its income from Medicare, but, you know, put that aside because, if you're conservative, you have to forget that or your tiny little brains will explode).

You know what the moral is? That only conservatives can help them through the magic of capitalism: "And they're desperate. And sometimes when you're like that -- let me tell you know, no matter how much your principles may be, you're susceptible to this argument that maybe government is the only thing that can help. And that's where we have to come in and explain that that's not true." What the fuck? Rubio never tells us another real thing about the family other than that they exist and he has proximity to them. It's like if Aesop told the story of the tortoise and the hare, stopped when the race started, and said, "Well, that slow-ass tortoise is fucked unless something happens."

4. Everything Rand Paul says sounds like the rantings of a heavy peyote user: "So what I ask the president, if he wants to let the school children back in the White House, what about the $3 million that we spend studying monkeys on meth? Does it really take $3 million to discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth?" Of course the CPACers laughed. Monkeys on meth? Hilarious. Imagine the possibilities: monkey meth whores offering to blow bonobos for some rock, jungle meth labs blowing up in the trees, Breaking Bananas, awesomeness.

This is an old story; we're years into the conservative glee over the monkey/meth study, which actually has produced actionable research in how to help humans get over drug addiction. But don't let that get in the way of a great anecdote. Meth monkeys. That's hysterical.

5. Later in his speech, Paul offered a line that is so completely wrong that it's breathtaking: "The only stimulus ever proven to work is leaving more money in the hands of those who earned it." So, um, World War II, just as one big, shiny obvious example of the wrong wrongness of this lie of a statement? Of course, it was received with massive cheers and applause because if there's one thing conservative politicians know it's that their followers love to receive heaping, steaming piles of shit served to them on silver platters.

6. Mostly, though, fuck both these guys, the alleged saviors of the Republican Party. The party is beyond saving and the flagging efforts of tools like Rubio and Paul are pathetic in that "oh, fuck, just shoot the lame horse" way. Somewhere in the depths of the Gaylord Resort, you know that a corpulent guy in a tri-corner hat was sitting pantsless, weeping as he tried to yank and will his little dick into an erection while listening to Rubio or Paul, finally getting it to reach a semi-boner before it wilted away, like his movement has.