This controversy is so stupid, and so obvious, I’m actually surprised to see how many online liberals are falling for Conway’s scam.

Quick background: A GQ piece floating around recently details that Rand Paul, being a deeply bizarre individual, was up to some strange things in college. He was part of a secret society of, essentially, atheists and irreligious types, who published an underground anti-religious zine and pulled stupid pranks on the hyper-religious Baylor University he was attending at the time.

Libertarians have a long history of flirtation with Atheism, albeit of the ‘I don’t believe in God but gee I think the Free Market is magic’ variety, so this should come as a surprise to precisely nobody; yet of course, it does, because Paul is running as a Republican, though from the Tea Party wing.

There’s a much darker side to that GQ story too: in another incident from his secret society days, Paul and another member supposedly bound and abducted a woman, attempted to force her to smoke pot, and when that failed, forced her to worship ‘Aqua Buddha’ in a creek.

The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Naturally, his opponent, Jack Conway, putatively a Democrat, made an ad about this story. What outraged Jack most?

Well, it sure wasn’t the alleged kidnapping. Here, watch for yourself.

Transcript:
“Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a ‘hoax’? That was banned from mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a ‘false idol’ and tell her his god was ‘Aqua Buddha’? Why does Rand Paul now want to end all federal faith based initiatives, and even end the deduction for religious charities? Why are there so many questions about Rand Paul?”

Get that? He ‘tied a woman up’, but that is clearly far less serious than the fact that Paul wasn’t a devout Christian, that he mocked ‘Christ’ and the ‘Holy’ Bible and that he made his abductee ‘worship a false idol’. Oh, and Paul wants to end faith-based initiative bailouts, which Conway asserts is a very bad thing indeed.

Quick question, Conway: how can you proclaim an idol ‘false’? Here’s a clue: your God’s fake, he never existed, and Jesus? He may have existed, or not; there is absolutely no hard archaeological evidence that the man ever existed. None. Period.

All stories and accounts about Jesus begin to appear in writing about a half-century after his supposed death. There is far more hard evidence for Atlantis than Jesus.

Yet here we have a DEMOCRAT plainly asserting that an alleged kidnapping is far less important than that Rand Paul didn’t always believe in Jesus. That he prayed to a ‘false idol,’ whatever that means, is more important than binding and kidnapping a college co-ed.

Bonus: Jack Conway is the current Attorney General of Kentucky; a man who thinks that saying bad things about a fictional character trumps kidnapping.

Such is the monstrous perversity of religion.

The perversity of liberal politics, however, means that this incredibly self-indulgent theocratic insanity is actually attracting praise, sometimes from commentators who have long warned against conservatives pushing theocracy!

Digby thinks this is just the sort of advertising we need.

Sarah Posner thinks the ad should have been even more about religion and less about, you know, an alleged felony.

Markos Moulitsas misses the point, but that’s nothing new. Extra special stupid bonus: he thinks it’s just fine that as an Atheist he himself is unelectable in much of America. Well, ok, more like virtually all of America.

So glad to see an Atheist willing to settle for second-class citizenship. Moron.

America continues to disgust me, but the Democrats always find new ways to make it worse.

Update: Conway’s whole campaign seems to be fucking nuts; the religious issue is always more important to them:

“Values matter. Rand Paul chose to join a secret society the university banned,” said Allison Haley, a spokesman for the Conway campaign. “Tying up a woman, no matter what the reason, is nothing to laugh at.”

Check out this fantastic video/rant/musical piece on growing up Catholic, and sitting through the sermons:

I’m going to have to rent this guy’s DVD from netflix, at a minimum.

(From Friendly Atheist)

Ah, another day, another pathetic argument in favor of requiring Americans to pay Wellpoint a tithe or else the IRS comes after their paychecks.

After a bit of rambling on how health-care and health insurance aren’t the same thing (no shit, Sherlock), and a bit of history on how ERs are supposedly forced to cover the uninsured (a practice that works far better in theory than in reality, as hospitals deny urgent care all the damn time), Kay over at BJ rolls out with this chestnut:

You don’t have to buy health insurance. You don’t have to pay a private insurer. What you do have to do is contribute to the costs of covering the pool called “the uninsured” because if you don’t purchase the subsidized policy and instead pay the tax penalty, you’ll be uninsured. And it costs to provide emergency care to “the uninsured”. A lot. And the federal government reimburses part of that cost.

This is fantastic logic! When a law extends penalties enforced by the executive branch, it’s not really saying you *can’t* do something, or that you shouldn’t, it’s just, you know, trying to recoup costs. Let’s extend the reasoning:

You don’t *have* to avoid beating your neighbor to death with a ball-peen hammer; you just have to contribute to the costs of burying them by working the rest of your life making license plates.

Oh wait; that’s fucking stupid sophistry, isn’t it? The law’s primary purpose is clearly to deter murder, just like the primary purpose of the Individual Mandate is *clearly* to coerce people into paying for insurance. Handy hint, Kay: that’s why it goes up from 1 to 2.5% of income. It doesn’t do that because ER costs are anticipated to go up 150% in two years.

But, riddle me this, Kay: if the penalty for the Individual Mandate was really to cover emergency room care, as you claim, then surely it would, in fact, be collected into a separate fund and dispersed to hospitals as needed to reimburse said care, or else set aside specifically to reimburse the costs of ER care in some other fashion, perhaps pooled with other money that goes to that purpose and so forth.

So, is it? Is the Individual Mandate in fact used to raise money for ER care?

Show me the section of the bill where that occurs. I’m intensely curious to know how fining people who don’t want to spend up to 20% of their income annually on insurance they can’t afford to use ends up paying for ER beds under this legislation, because I just can’t find the section. Please, illuminate me on the funding mechanism you’ve outlined here; specific citations to relevant portions of the law would be helpful.

Please do that, or stop making shit up.

Update: The law Kay cites that forces hospitals to cover (limited) ER care regardless of insurance? The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act? It doesn’t provide any funding to hospitals for covering said care. Rather, it uses a big stick, that you have to do so to participate in Medicare.

So, in other words, Kay’s entire argument is full of shit, since the Federal government does not pay for uncompensated ER care today. There is absolutely no mechanism in place to do so, and therefore the Individual Mandate penalty must serve some other purpose.

I wonder what that could be.