This piqued my curiosity when Ben Smith of BuzzFeed tweeted about it this morning.

A hawkish conservative sends over this video, aimed at discrediting Rand Paul http://t.co/oAALidAogl

— Ben Smith (@benyt) April 25, 2013

The argument: "Is our country a battlefield?" doesn't sound quite as good as it did during the filibuster http://t.co/oAALidAogl

— Ben Smith (@benyt) April 25, 2013

Is it an amateur vid that the creator pinged him on just to get some attention or a professional job by a campaign or advocacy group that’s eyeing Paul as a potential problem in 2016? BuzzFeed hasn’t posted it, but Smith doesn’t usually push random reader submissions out there. It feels professional to me. There are too many gratuitous little polished details, from the letterboxing to the washed-out effect to the audio editing, for the average YouTube user. A random guy who wanted to make this point wouldn’t need to do all that; he’d just grab the Paul audio and lay it over the bombing shots. Also, the “Rand Is Wrong” title smells like a tagline for something, maybe for some sort of attack website that someone’s building. Could be this was a sneak preview offered to Smith to get people talking before whatever “Rand Is Wrong” is ends up launching.

It’s unfair, too. To watch this, you’d think Paul was opposed to shooting back at terrorists on U.S. soil when, not two days ago, he was telling Neil Cavuto he’s okay with using drones to take out an armed man suspected of robbery. His shtick about not treating the country as a battlefield is limited to the narrow case of a U.S. citizen here at home who’s suspected of planning an attack but who hasn’t acted (yet). He doesn’t want that guy incinerated by a Hellfire missile the way suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen routinely are. If that’s too weak for whoever’s behind this clip, I’d hate to think what rules of engagement he/they would prefer. In fact, Paul’s big headache right now isn’t with conservatives who think he’s a libertarian squish on terror, it’s with libertarians who think he’s turning into some sort of drone-happy hawk. Just wait until the media starts pestering him about some of the people who populate the advisory board of his pop’s new think tank and he’s forced to denounce them too. Come 2016, he’s going to have more problems with his dad’s base than he will with mainstream conservatives. Which is wise, given their relative numbers.