Hot off his revival of
the Senate tradition of filibustering for hours and hours over the
administration’s foreign, and possibly domestic, drone strike policy, Rand Paul
took the number one slot as their presidential choice in 2016 at the recent
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in DC last week.
When he speaks about mountaintop removal, Paul couches his approval of the mining
practice in terms of property rights, which are, along with their ideas of
“small government” and their views of the U.S. Constitution, one of the
sacrosanct components for the libertarians' utopia. For Paul, if a coal company
owns land, they can mine it any which way they want to. Of the destruction of
Kentucky’s landscape caused by mountaintop removal, he goes on to say, “I
don’t’ think that anyone is going to be missing a hill or two here and there.”
And that’s pretty much it, when it comes to Rand Paul’s take on mountaintop
removal.
It
makes my head spin that anybody who talks like this could be seriously
considered for any public office, let alone the presidency of the United
States. Is it that Paul has been so blinded by the vacuously constructed Ayn
Rand view of the world that he simply believes that one of the most destructive
mining practices the world knows is allowed because a coal company owns a plot
of land? Or is Paul simply using the rhetoric of one of the extreme ends of the
GOP to give cover to the mountaintop removal mining companies?
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