In an interview on Morning Joe today, Rand Paul claimed Republicans created ISIS:

ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately. And most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], which would have made ISIS’s job even easier. They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved — they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it.

That’s not the way I remember things. As I remember it, Republicans wanted Congress to have a say over American military involvement in Libya given that the Arab League, NATO and the UN vetted the thing.

Paul’s claims that Republicans “created these people” is utter fantasy and dishonors the memory of James Foley and Steven Sotloff who were beheaded by ISIS. It would behoove Paul read Graeme Wood’s comprehensive article in The Atlantic on ISIS from earlier this year.

But I suspect Wood’s article would be lost on Paul who seems content to come off as a conspiracy theorist like, well, his father. Ron Paul has long blamed U.S. foreign policy for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

It just goes to show that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.

UPDATED: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who is widely expected to join the GOP race soon, issued the following statement:

This is a perfect example of why Senator Paul is unsuited to be Commander-in-Chief. We have men and women in the military who are in the field trying to fight ISIS right now, and Senator Paul is taking the weakest, most liberal Democrat position. It’s one thing for Senator Paul to take an outlandish position as a Senator at Washington cocktail parties, but being Commander-in-Chief is an entirely different job. We should all be clear that evil and Radical Islam are at fault for the rise of ISIS, and people like President Obama and Hillary Clinton exacerbate it.

Don’t be surprised if other GOP aspirants follow suit.