The security camera video of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's encounter with Nashville airport TSA agents is here, complete with wacky libertarian captions, so now you can make your own determination about how full of shit he was when he told his communications manager he was being detained by the TSA. Our verdict: still totally full of shit.

I got a lot of mail, some of it syntactically and orthographically correct, disputing my account of Rand Paul's full-of-shitness by referring to the dictionary definition of the word "detained." Here is my feeling: when your argument centers around "the dictionary definition" of anything and involves the adverb "technically," you are full of shit. When you tell someone you are being "detained by the TSA," you don't mean "sitting in a chair while they decide what to do."

I admit, reasonable people can disagree. Maybe Rand Paul speaks in a kind of old-timey way, and uses "detained" to just mean "slowed down," and genuinely had no idea that if he wrote he was being "detained" by the TSA people would infer something very different. But I think we can all agree that whatever sympathy we might have had to the libertarian-Drudge conservative alliance against TSA pat-downs has more or less completely vanished thanks to the nauseatingly unfunny captions added by the Rand Paul fan who found the video.

[via Buzzfeed]