The Rand Paul/Civil Rights controversy didn’t die down over the weekend. Yesterday Sarah Palin appeared on Fox News (ohh – big shock!) and was defending Paul against the “prejudice” media (ohh – even bigger shock!):

“One thing we can learn in this lesson that I have learned and Rand Paul is learning now is don’t assume that you can engage in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts with a reporter or a media personality who has an agenda, who may be prejudiced before they even get into the interview in regards to what your answer may be,” Palin said. “You know, they are looking for the gotcha moment. And that evidently appears to be what they did with Rand Paul, and I’m thankful he clarified his answer about his support for the Civil Rights Act.”

So asking a candidate for the upper chamber of Congress what his views are on key pieces of legislative history is “prejudice”? Does Sarah Palin even know the meaning of the word?

Honestly, this is so bad that Sarah Palin is now even to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial board:

Even if Mr. Paul was speaking out of a principled belief in the rights of voluntary association, he was wrong on the Constitutional and historic merits. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — and its companion laws, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — were designed to address abuses of state and local government power. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up in the South after Reconstruction and prevailed for nearly a century were not merely the result of voluntary association. Discrimination — public and private — was enforced by police power and often by violence.

In parts of the mid-20th-century South, black men were lynched, fire hoses and vicious dogs were turned on children, and churches were bombed with worshippers inside. By some accounts, two-thirds of the Birmingham, Alabama, police force in the early 1960s belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. State and local government officials simply refused to acknowledge the civil rights of blacks and had no intention of doing so unless outside power was brought to bear.

The federal laws of that era were necessary and legal interventions to remedy the unconstitutional infringement on individual rights by state and local governments.

Hopefully the Tea Party will push Palin in as the 2012 nominee so we can keep the discussion of right-wing ignorance alive for another two years.