What is Rand Paul on about? The junior senator from Kentucky and presidential candidate whined to the Washington Post yesterday that Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski—whose name the paper’s reporter does not know how to spell*—is an "idiot."
Kaczynski has written several pieces pointing out that Paul’s books are full of obviously fake quotations from the Founding Fathers. The senator, who told the audience at the last Republican presidential debate that he "spend[s] [his] days defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights," isn’t happy about it.
"That guy," Paul said dismissively, referring to Kaczynski. "The only criticisms have come from some guy who’s a partisan. We discount partisans. However, there’s a ridiculous cottage industry out there of people who think they’re smarter than everyone else, and because certain quotes are disputed—well, yeah! If you want to say something’s not a Thomas Jefferson quote, you can get a whole book on whether it’s a quote or not."
Is Paul really this foolish? Does he really think it’s a matter of scholarly debate whether words from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, according to the formularies of which he was himself baptized, were in fact written a century and a half earlier by Thomas Jefferson? He reminds me of Will Ferrell insisting that "San Diego" means something about a whale’s vagina. The mind reels.
"It’s idiocy, it’s pedantry," Paul told the Post. "[I]t’s ridiculous stuff from partisan hacks. And I’d say that guy’s one of ‘em." It isn’t though, Rand. Let’s forget about Google and presidential historians for a moment:
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that a "government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have," he could have easily been referencing Obamacare.
If you think this is an example of late 18th-century English diction and syntax, you’re probably not reading at an eighth grade level.
Ugh. I have always associated complaints about "pedantry" with frenetic D.C. journalists who think that grammar is boring and that fun tapas places and the latest #breaking content about the speakership race are the be-all end-all of human flourishing—precisely, I suppose, the audience to whom Paul is hoping to appeal these days. We’ll learn soon whether it works out for him.
Meanwhile, facts, as one Founding Father put it (for real), "are stubborn things."
UPDATE: 11:45 a.m. In a vivid illustration of the occupational hazards besetting the pedant, Twitter’s Adam Maxwell points out that in a previous version of this post, the portion addressing Will Ferrell and whales’ vaginas misspelled the actor’s surname.
* This is a genuine example of pedantry.