Rand Paul's Shameless Line of Attack on Nikki Haley

The senator is counting on Republican primary voters being fiscal idiots.

With a decisive (but narrower than expected) win in New Hampshire this week, the GOP establishment has continued to coalesce around Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump. Polls suggest that Nikki Haley stands little chance of catching up with the former president in upcoming primary states, and more Republican office holders and prominent right-wing media figures have been endorsing Trump, and calling for Haley to bow out of the race.

Even RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has gotten in on the act, already referring to Trump as the “eventual nominee” and calling on Republicans to “unite around” him (a possible violation of RNC chair rules).

But Haley has vowed to stay in, at least for now. The next primary is South Carolina, her home state where she was a successful two-term governor. The election is a full month away, and she hopes to chip away at Trump’s large poll-lead over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, Trump’s surrogates in Washington continue to come at Haley hard… including with some pretty dopey attack-lines. One of the most intellectually insulting is this one from Senator Rand Paul:

I covered the second part of Paul’s critique — the hit on Ukraine — a few weeks ago. Fellow Republican Senator J.D. Vance has been pushing the same demagogic, straw-man nonsense — the claim that if someone supports U.S. defense-aid for Ukraine (which Haley does), that person is doing so at the expense of (or instead of) some totally separate, fill-in-the-blank issue.

And Paul and Vance truly are filling in the blanks. One week it’s our entitlement programs, the next week it’s the U.S. border, and the next week it will be something else. There’s no serious logic behind lumping such items together, other than for the purpose of forumlating a disingenuous talking point. But such mantras sound righteous, they’ve worked well for anti-war activists over the years, and it’s an easy tactic to employ… especially once you’ve traded in every ounce of your personal shame for political ambition.

That said, it’s the first strike of Paul’s purported one-two punch above that I find particularly idiotic, especially given that he’s dishing out the criticism on Trump’s behalf. Paul claims that Nikki Haley thinks “deficits don't matter,” a charge he keeps repeating.

What is he talking about, exactly?

In trying to figure out the answer, let’s begin by identifying one individual who Paul conveniently failed to include on his list of alleged deficit agnostics — a man he’s refusing to call out by name on any matter of fiscal significance: Donald J. Trump.

As president, Trump (the self-described “King of Debt”) not only signed into law legislation that added nearly $8 trillion to our national debt (producing ten-year deficits, including the highest in U.S. history), but declared at the onset of his presidency that he would veto any attempt to reform our entitlement programs… which, of course, are the major drivers of our country’s debt. Trump even threatened to politically hurt any Republicans who presented such legislation. All of this, you may recall, happened on Senator Paul’s watch.

Paul is assuredly also aware that Trump, throughout his current presidential campaign, has been attacking his GOP primary opponents for proposing spending cuts, while again vowing not to address entitlements.

Haley, on the other hand, in addition to never having added cent to the national debt, has been a vocal proponent of (and is even campaigning on) reforming our entitlement programs — you know, to actually begin to address our country’s debt problem… nearly a quarter of which is attributable to Donald Trump… the guy Rand Paul won’t criticize (for seemingly anything anymore).

I get that most Republican voters (along with most Americans) don’t really care about the debt and deficits anymore, but maybe they should care that Rand Paul is counting on them being complete and utter morons on the topic.