First of all, good on Rand Paul for refusing to shake hands with a man who has libeled him. There is way too much phony niceness in our politics.
Second, I am amused to the gills by how much has been made of Rand Paul’s membership in the NoZe Brotherhood (“Approaching Mediocrity Since 1924″) when he was an undergrad at Baylor. Seriously? That’s the best the Democrats have?
I know a little bit about the NoZe — or at least about what they were up to in the Nineties, when I was in college, and spent a fair amount of time on the Baylor campus. Baylor, you’ll have to remember, until fairly recently was a school that took its Baptist affiliation very, very seriously: no dances on campus, etc. The NoZe Brotherhood is a kind of anti-fraternity that existed largely to annoy the self-serious element on their campus with self-aggrandizing pranks — like painting a giant nose on the side of a building that formed the backdrop of one year’s graduation ceremony — and, once upon a time, by publishing a pretty good spoof of Baylor’s campus newspaper, The Lariat, called The Rope.
If the worst that can be said about Rand Paul is that he once was a rebellious teen-ager or young twentysomething with a slightly off-kilter sense of humor (and possibly some killer bambalacha), then Rand Paul probably will be the cleanest man in the Senate since Charles Sumner. Either way, I’d rather have a NoZe guy in the Senate than yet another Skull-and-Bones alumnus.