Justin Elliot of TalkingPointsMemo joins the anti-Rand Paul bandwagon with "Rand Paul In '08: Beware The NAFTA Superhighway!" [1], another low-grade attempt to discredit those who are rightfully concerned about that issue. And, what Elliot doesn't know is that Paul's comments closely mirror those of Barack Obama, although the latter wasn't concerned about it.

Elliot quotes Paul:

"It's gonna go up through Texas, I guess, all the way to Montana," said Paul, at an event in Bozeman. "So, it's a real thing, and when you talk about it, the thing you just have to be aware of is that, if you talk about it like it's a conspiracy, they'll paint you as a nut."

As was amply documented by The Nation a few years back, "There's no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway." It represents, Newsweek put it, "a strange stew of fact and fiction, fired by paranoia" that was popularized by Jerome Corsi, the man who spearheaded the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004.

Now, compare that to these Barack Obama comments:

"the fact that there's this highway being built in Texas that will facilitate more transportation and travel between Mexico and the intercontinental United States, on up to Canada"

Montana, Canada, same difference. The two sources Elliot cites were briefly mentioned in the post about NAU deniers; the reader letters on The Nation article are worth a glance: link (archive.org used because the original page doesn't exist anymore).

Note also that Rudy Giuliani's law firm was involved in the Texas leg of the project (the "TransTexas Corridor), and the Bush administration denied it was a plan. Meanwhile, the government of Manitoba not only confirmed it was plan, but had a map of it on their site.

[1] tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/
rand_paul_beware_the_nafta_superhighway_video.php