Rand Paul Airs His Grievances For Festivus

How have you been celebrating the holiday season so far? Obviously, we're still in the thick of Hannukah, with both Christmas and Kwanzaa soon on the horizon. But in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, one Kentucky senator decided to embrace some festivities of a different sort — Rand Paul tweeted his Festivus grievances for the year, making it obvious that yes, he too watched sitcoms during the 1990s. Politicians, they're just like us!

Festivus, for the uninitiated, is a semi-comic, alternative winter holiday first exposed to a national audience on NBC's Seinfeld in 1997. An actual event which occurred in the household of Dan O'Keefe, one of the show's writers, the episode effectively launched Festivus as an altogether real, practiced seasonal event for many people who wanted a little more fun, secular spice for the season.

The conceit is fairly simple — Festivus centers around a number of traditions, in particular the "Airing of Grievances," which Paul decided to voice on Twitter Tuesday morning. There are also others traditions, like the mandatory wrestling of a head of household, but Paul wisely decided to focus on the one everybody knows, lest he end up in a heated grapple with Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor.

And if one thing is clear from Paul's tweets, it's that nobody is exempt from his annual grievance-airing — not Democrats, not Republicans, and certainly not the reporters who cover him. After all, "I've got a lot of problems with you people" isn't the kind of message politicians normally want to send.

Nor, frankly, is joking about a past history of plagiarism. But it seems like Rand is on a roll, here — he also needled Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski, for his part in exposing plagiarism in his book. This is a little surprising, at least insofar as plagiarism seems to be not as big a deal for potential presidential contenders as it once did. No less than current Vice President Joe Biden, in fact, had his 1988 presidential campaign derailed by plagiarism accusations.

He also spent some time today poking at the Democratic Party, after a brutal midterm election season. Paul is enjoying the newfound thrills of being a high-profile member of a majority party, and he's not shy about letting his rivals know it.

To say nothing of the sartorial choices of some of his fellow GOP comrades. That is a pretty sharp sweater vest, though.

This one... not so much.

Paul would also like you to know that, contrary to the longstanding, scurrilous rumors, he's not bald.

And whatever you may think about his politics — I have some pretty severe disagreements, myself — you can't deny he's got the right attitude about this, as demonstrated by his epic, troll-style punctuation on the most recent spate of tweets. Wondering what Rand Paul looks like while he's calling people out?

Yeah, that looks about right. And Paul tweeted an hour ago that he may be back with more grievances later today, so who knows who else will end up getting that smug mug smiling back at them.

Image: Getty Images