Pauline Perils

It's hard to figure out who is the most offensive of the Republican new faces that will appear in Washington in January, but right now I would guess Rand Paul by a wide margin. He's not named for Ayn Rand - his name is actually short for Randal - but he shares the selfishness-oriented and self-centered socioeconomic philosophy of Alan Greenspan's former mentor. He's actually been quoted as saying the rich should be "left alone" in any tax policy that the 112th Congress devises, and we depend on the wealthy to maintain a prosperous society. And remember, Paul has come out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a point of fact that would have likely brought out enough black voters elsewhere but not in Kentucky, one of the whitest states south of the Ohio River.

Runners-up in the new Senate for loathsomeness Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, who has forwarded arguments against helping to rebuild his state's beleaguered steel industry; Ohio's Rob Portman, who was George Walker Bush's trade representative and is therefore in part responsible for Ohio's current industrial malaise; and Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, who says global warming is caused by "sunspots" and has refused to answer questions on specific issues, like veterans' affairs.

But we can take comfort that Carly Fiorina, Linda McMahon, Christine O'Donnell, and the spectacularly insufferable Sharron Angle - without question the scariest ladies' auxiliary in Republican politics in recent memory (although Sarah Palin is scarier than all of them put together) - won't be in that august chamber.

The House is less august, and so that chamber can take a few crackpots. The only problem is that those crackpots - including the incoherent and personally horrible Ben Quayle - are part of the new Republican majority.

Oh, and though the mainstream media aren't likely to make a big deal out of it, only 31 percent of Republican candidates for Congress associated with the Tea Party won on Tuesday.

As for Rand Paul, who now has the power to stop legislation by himself, he can now follow the Randian (as in Ayn) philosophy of one individual against the collective body.

Led in part by Mitch McConnell.

I don't know how President Obama is going to react, but I was anything but re-assured by his lame press conference yesterday.