"Here. I brought a club. Beat me. Ow! Stop! You're being SO mean!"

Did Rand Paul go on the Maddow Show to make himself a victim?

Paul blames 'loony left' for civil rights focus

Rand Paul lashed out at the "loony left" for pressing him on his view of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in an interview with Laura Ingraham this morning.

"I’ve never really favored any change in the Civil Rights Act," he said. "They seem to have unleashed some of the loony left on me."

Paul called the Civil Rights Act "settled" but suggested he does view federal regulation of private business on matters of racial discrimination as fundamentally unconstitutional.

A sympathetic Ingraham questioned his political judgement in appearing on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, where he was pressed on the question yesterday.

"Why the heck would you go on the Rachel Maddow Show?" she askd. "What do you think you're going to get when you go on Rachel Maddow's show?"

"The problem with Rachel and most people from the left is they want to make this an issue about you supporting abhorrent practices which I don't support," he said, again pronouncing himself a foe of "institutional racism."

"There was a need for federal intervention to say we can't have segregation," Paul told Ingraham, referring to the elements of segregation that were linked to government services and federal funding.