Republican Establishment Hierarchy Unites To Take Down Rand Paul

I have no reason to believe that dull, colorless Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson is gay. But otherwise, he's almost exactly like Kentucky political boss hog, Mitch "Miss" McConnell. McConnell, in fact, handpicked his protégé, Grayson, to replace the daily more obviously senile Jim Bunning (who McConnell brazenly squeezed out of a re-election bid). McConnell and his allies Inside-the-Beltway, particularly the hapless John Cornyn, and in Frankfort have had a rude awakening as Kentucky Republicans have rejected their cookie cutter nonentity candidate in favor of Ron Paul's semi-teabaggy anti-Establishment son Rand. In short Rand Paul is cleaning Trey Grayson's clock. And Grayson's helping him with boneheaded ads like this:



Yesterday Jonathan Martin explained why McConnell and his allies are so hysterical as they see their puppet-like lackey going down to an ugly defeat:

Two months before the election, the libertarian-leaning Paul, son of the Texas congressman and quixotic presidential contender, has tapped into anti-Washington grassroots fervor on the right and staked out an advantage over Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state and establishment favorite... A win by Paul, a Bowling Green ophthalmologist, would represent the first true electoral success of the tea party movement. Equally important, it would embarrass Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose political organization is running Grayson’s campaign, thrust onto the national stage a Republican with foreign policy views out of the conservative mainstream and, strategists in both parties believe, imperil the GOP’s hold on the seat now held by retiring Sen. Jim Bunning.

Recognizing the threat, a well-connected former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney convened a conference call last week between Grayson and a group of leading national security conservatives to sound the alarm about Paul.

“On foreign policy, [global war on terror], Gitmo, Afghanistan, Rand Paul is NOT one of us,” Cesar Conda wrote in an e-mail to figures such as Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dan Senor and Marc Thiessen. "This guy could become our Republican senator from Kentucky?” he exclaimed. “It’s very alarming.”

Grayson has launched a website, www.randpaulstrangeideas.com, that features a picture of a turtleneck-clad Paul against a quasi-psychedelic background and that details his positions on national security as well as cultural matters such as marriage, abortion and marijuana (as a libertarian-leaning Republican, Paul tends to want such matters decided on the state level).

One veteran Kentucky Republican who is backing Grayson said the hope was that Paul’s outsider status would be what ultimately does him in.

“Kentucky voters are going to see a fuller picture of him as an outsider in the worst sense of the phrase,” said this Republican. “His money comes from outside of the state, and his views are outside of the Kentucky mainstream.”

Further, argued this Republican, Paul is not the political neophyte he claims to be and actually wants to continue in the footsteps of his iconoclastic, 75-year-old father in the tradition of other political dynasties.

“He really wants to take over the family’s political business in Washington,” said this source.

Republican voters in Kentucky aren't buying it and the harsher the attacks against Paul by McConnell and his allies, the more right-wing voters rally around him.