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It has become the Rand Paul pattern: A few weeks paddling vigorously in the mainstream, followed by a lapse into authenticity, followed by transparent damage control, followed by churlishness toward anyone in the media who notices. All the signs of a man trying to get comfortable in someone elses skin.

The latest example is vaccination. I have heard of many tragic cases, said Dr. Paul, of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. Following the ensuing firestorm, the Republican senator from Kentucky insisted, I did not say vaccines caused disorders, just that they were temporally related.

In effect: I did not sleep with that causation.

Paul blamed his troubles on the liberal media which, after a little digging, reported that, in 2009, he had called mandatory vaccinations a step toward martial law.

When Chris Christie commits a gaffe on vaccination and reverses himself, it indicates a man out of his depth. With Paul, it reveals the unexplored depths of a highly ideological and conspiratorial worldview.

The same dynamic was at work when Paul accused public health authorities of dishonesty about the true nature of the Ebola threat; or when he raised the prospect of Americans typing an e-mail in a cafe being summarily executed by a Hellfire missile; or when he accused Dick Cheney of supporting the Iraq war to benefit Halliburton; or when he accused the United States of provoking Japan into World War II; or when he criticized the application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to private enterprise. Wherever you scratch the paint, there is some underlying, consistent philosophy at work.

This, of course, is true of any thoughtful politician (which Paul certainly is). But while many prospective presidential candidates seek catchier ways to express their political philosophy, Paul must take pains to conceal the ambition of his ideals.

His domestic libertarianism provides no philosophical foundation for most of the federal government. As a practical matter, he can call for the end of Obamacare but not for the abolition of Medicare or Medicaid or the National Institutes of Health. Yet these concessions to reality are fundamentally arbitrary. The only principle guiding Pauls selectivity is the avoidance of gaffes. Of which he is not always the best judge.

The same is true of Pauls constitutional foreign policy, which he now calls (as evidence of his evolution) conservative realism. There is no previously existing form of realism that urges a dramatically weakened executive in the conduct of foreign and defense policy which is Pauls strong preference. He denies the legal basis for the war on terrorism, warns against an oppressive national security state and proposes to scale back American commitments in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Paul is properly described as a libertarian noninterventionist.

His father, Ron Paul, is gleefully specific in his charge that American aggression creates the blowback of terrorism. The son qualifies the argument without repudiating it. Some anger is blowback, he now says. In 2009, he called his fathers theory a message that can be presented and be something that Republicans can agree to. A recommended reading list posted (briefly) last year on Pauls Senate Web site included Chalmers Johnsons Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and Ron Pauls A Foreign Policy of Freedom.

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Rand Pauls gaffes offer a glimpse of his worldview