Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul continued his media tour Monday, talking to Fox News' Neil Cavuto about the fracas created by his recent statements on the Civil Rights Act and Obama's handling of the BP oil spill.
Paul said he was "vilified" by the liberal media, which he maintained had mischaracterized his views on a variety of issues, most notably the Civil Rights Act, in order to try to destroy the Tea Party.
"It's been really a concerted effort by people who want to damage the tea party, people who want to make the tea party something it's not, people who want to characterize me as someone who I'm not," Paul said. "I take great pride in presenting myself as someone who is thoughtful, someone who is respectful and I see more of an intolerance on the left in the sense that they won't discuss the ideas in a sane way, other than to call me names and call me hateful things that really doesn't further the discussions of any of these problems in our country."
Cavuto then asked Paul if we would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he had been in Congress at the time.
"I would vote for the Civil Rights Act," Paul responded. "I think the Civil Rights Act was necessary to right a great wrong, and yet I'm vilified for even having any kind of audacity to at least discuss any of it. I think that's really -- it gets away from having any kind of, you know, any kind of real discussion on television. You know the most common answer I've been told to give when I'm on national TV now is, 'don't answer the question, keep repeating some answer you want to give.'"
The conversation then moved to Paul's recent comments on Obama's response to the BP oil spill in which he said Obama "sounds really un-American in his criticism of business." Asked how he responded to Obama's recent rebuke of a new BP ad campaign, Paul said:
"It bothers me. I saw the full-page ad in the newspaper and they've promised to pay for the clean up. Do we have to have a villain? That's my whole point -- do we want a presidential administration that says outlandish things like we're going to put our boot heel on BP? I want BP to pay, everybody wants them to pay for cleaning up the oil mess. But the thing is, is that sometimes people are well-intentioned and bad things happen. And I don't know if there was negligence or fault here -- it should be investigated and if there is someone should be punished for it. But we shouldn't automatically assume that there is."
WATCH the interview: