For today, even as he finds “a lot to admire” in the Tea Party (his words, re: their pugnacious tenacity, or tenacious pugilistic rhetoric, or amiable backwardness, or something I don’t admire), conservative columnist and personal lit-nemesis Douthat admits that its most recent star has lost significant shine. Sayeth Douthat:

…it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Kentucky Republican and Tea Party boy-wonder Rand Paul] found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Rand Paul, son of Ron “Ross Perot Redux” Paul, is looking to win the Party of Chai’s first Senate seat. But now he’s waffled on civil rights. Would he have voted to desegregate America? He didn’t seem sure, fearing government intervention in private practices such as excluding minorities from business, until those biased scoundrels—the Media—pressured him into clarifying his position as a bona fide 9/10ths supporter of the O.G. Civil Rights Act.

Boo, hiss, Mr. Paul. Waffling on a complicated budget bill? Take your time, read the fine lines. Waffling on waffles? Sure, consider pancakes. But waffling on civil rights? That’s so… old school. And not in the good way.

Hilariously, Douthat also points us to Paul’s record of paranoia regarding government projects which patently do not exist.

Now, I’m just as terrified as the next man of the secret alien commune in the Mojave where the Liberal Illuminati force Elvis to play badminton with Walt Disney’s headless body for their own amusement, but… A NAFTA superhighway “the width of several football fields” running straight from Mexico to Canada, cutting America in half like a government-cheese sandwich? That’s just crazy-talk.

(Plus, everyone knows a NAFTA superhighway would have to divert through the Babyhating Blue-State Coasts, forming a hateful wishbone that could eventually cross both oceans and be connected, on the Commie side, to Tokyo, and, on the Frog side, to Space Paris, from which we liberals receive our command-signals.)

[Double-plus, we don't have nearly enough oil to support the super-massive car-traffic of a highway "several football fields" wide. Unless Paul fears an army of Mexican, Central American, and South American immigrants bicycling furiously toward Texas, ready to take his job from him.]

Rand Paul does have some positive visions of the future, however: “I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”

Hell yeah, Amero-Pangaea! Lookin good.