WOW from Reason: Rand Paul Goes Hawkish, Propose Massive Defense Increases, Becomes Less Interesting.

Rand Paul introduced a budget amendment late yesterday calling for a nearly $190 billion infusion to the defense budget over the next two years—a roughly 16 percent increase.

Notes TIME:

Paul’s amendment brings him in line with his likely presidential primary rivals, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who introduced a measure calling for nearly the same level of increases just days ago.

It should be clear, as I have warned, that Rand is becoming more of a war hawk. It's only going to get worse as he attempts to gain the blessings of the neocons and the votes of  Evangelical war hawks.

TIME explains Rand's more hawkish position:

Under Paul’s original [2012 budget] proposal, defense spending would have dropped from $553 billion in the 2011 fiscal year to $542 billion in 2016. War funding would have plummeted from $159 billion to zero. He called it the “draw-down and restructuring of the Department of Defense.”

But under Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.

Even beltarian Reason magazine, which has been very friendly to Rand, is getting concerned. In a recent post titled: Rand Paul Goes Hawkish, Proposes Massive Defense Increases, Becomes Less Interesting, Nick Gillespie writes:

To the extent that Paul starts talking like, say, Marco Rubio, he will become far less interesting as a candidate and far less infuential as a much-needed counterweight to a resurgent neo-con mentality that has a hold on not just most of the Republican Party but Hillary Clinton as well. This sort of evolution comes even as diehard conservatives are finally calling bullshit on automatic approval of unnecessary Pentagon requests for more and more money.

  -RW