The classics are classics for a reason, people like to say. Why go with new material when the tried and true holds up so well?
And so when it comes to fawning profiles of Rand Paul, it’s best to just shut up and play the hits.
“The Most Interesting Man in Politics,” reads the headline of Time’s latest cover story on the junior Kentucky senator and possible GOP presidential contender.
Does that description sound familiar? It should!
Let’s flash back to a month ago, when Politico Magazine applied an identical superlative to Paul: “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.”
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza used a slightly different phrase last summer, but the sentiment was all the same. “Rand Paul is the most interesting man in the (political) world,” he wrote.
Not surprisingly, the libertarian magazine Reason hailed him as the “Most Interesting Man in the Senate” months after he took office in 2011.
But these journalists have company. Even members of the Obama administration find Paul to be – you guessed it — “interesting.”
“The Republican I find most interesting is Rand Paul, and the reason I say that is he is the only Republican who seems to know about what their long-term structural problems are and trying to do something about it,” White House communications aide Dan Pfeiffer told BuzzFeed in September.
TIME’s new cover: The Most Interesting Man in Politics. Can Rand Paul fix the GOP? http://t.co/PhOWzLG4DA http://t.co/LTHw8MWgHl
— TIME.com (@TIME) October 16, 2014
Or as Randy would put it, “Why steal new material when I 've already stolen the old stuff?”
When applied to a food, a movie, a book or an outfit the adjective ‘interesting’ usually connotes a person moderating their real negative opinion or a straw grabbed for lack of any other positive.
To my mind, interesting" is often just a polite way of saying something or someone is really, really, hilariously stupid.
Exactly, you don’t want to say, “this tastes like raw sewage served on a pile of dog vomit”, so you politely say that it’s interesting. Oddly enough, a Rand Paul presidency would be even less appealing than raw sewage served on a pile of dog vomit.
Asylums are full of “interesting” people.