Rand Paul …

Both

@ManchuCandidate: Ignorant is on purpose, stupid can’t be helped. I think he might just be too stupid to know facts and refuse to acknowledge them.

Not that Cokie Roberts comes off much better, mind you.

@Serolf Divad: Stunningly worse. When I watched that video earlier, she made me want to do harm to small furry critters.

@ManchuCandidate: Right? On the one hand, he’s a United States Senator, for crying out loud, so surely he’s seen some variation of this chart in the last twenty months. On the other hand, his utter confusion, particularly toward the end (“Less people employed or more people employed?”), suggests that he’s simply not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He sits on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, whose jurisdiction includes labor statistics. Of course.

@nojo: Giving Cokies everywhere a bad name. Bitch.
@mellbell: Am I the only one who instantly screamed “FEWER!” at the screen? In this crowd, I’d bet not.

Krugman nails it in a blog post entitled “The Zombie that Ate Rand Paul’s Brain”:

How did that happen? Almost surely it’s a case of a zombie lie that has gone unchallenged in the hermetic world of movement conservatism, so that people like Paul know, just know, something that ain’t so. I wrote about this way back: the usual suspects seized on the Census bulge in employment as evidence of a big-government surge; and because nobody in that business ever admits having been wrong, this became a “fact” that people like Rand Paul believe. He wouldn’t have made this mistake if he ever read or listened to an analysis from nonpartisan sources, but he evidently doesn’t.

PS: Am I the only one who dyslexically reads “Rand Paul” as “Paul Ryan”?

The profound stupidity of Republicans is exceeded only by their eagerness to display it and call it something else.

@Mistress Cynica: Giving Cokies everywhere a bad name.

Yeah, well, Mike Lee. Get used to it.

@Mistress Cynica: Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan…I always have to take a minute and sort out which one of these double-first-name morans we’re discussing. I probably shouldn’t bother.

Rand Paul Ryan Gosling is closing in on Boy George Michael Jackson Browne.

@flippin eck: double-first-name morans

We triple-first-name morans thank you for leaving us out of it.