I adore Rachel Maddow. Her quirky sense of humor and love of wonkery is at turns awe inspiring and bug cute. However, I think she did a lot of folks a disservice in the Rand Paul interview. She picked at the hypothetical civil rights vote like this guy I sat across the aisle on a transcontinental flight last week picked at his scalp for the entire five hour flight. Both made me squirm.
Paul had been well coached not to give Maddow a sound bite he thought could be used in commercials against him later. However, when your worldview basically boils down to something like "you are not the boss of me," it makes for some pretty wild tap dancing on a whole raft of issues. I would have liked Rachel to pursue the actual tenets of libertarianism, one wonk to another. I don't think Paul would have been able to resist. After all, at first glance, it seems to make sense.