Lies are contagious. Politicians know that if you repeat a lie enough, people will start to take it as fact. Republicans are still trying to somehow prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Bill O'Reilly is denying the existence of white privilege on the Daily Show*.

Rand Paul is becoming adept at carrying the Republican lie with a straight face. The Time magazine cover boy—they call him "The Most Interesting Man in Politics"—is trying to turn the conversation about Republican responsibility for the Ebola outbreak into a joke about an "origami condom."

As I've said, Republican budget cuts have damaged the public health infrastructure and weakened our defenses against outbreaks. Paul outright lied about those budget cuts—"No money has been cut in Washington," he said at a Republican rally yesterday—and then he cited a few studies involving fruit flies and monkeys to mock research that is currently being funded by the federal government. (This is a classic Republican tactic, as I noted on Monday.) And then, like any good joke, Paul unfurled the punchline, that the government is funding research into an "origami condom," which he then refused to describe any further for the sake of the children and families in attendance. It's a slick political move: Activate the prurient corners of the audience's minds while maintaining your position on the high road. I guarantee you that audience came away from that speech shocked and outraged over what their tax dollars were funding.

This is presumably the condom Paul is mocking. The company's name, Origami, comes from the fact that they make condoms that don't unroll. The rolling condoms we have used for over a century, as anyone who's ever used a condom can tell you, open a lot of possibilities for malfunctions. So Paul is mocking an attempt to make condoms safer, more pleasurable, and more foolproof. Further, Origami is trying to re-imagine condoms for women and condoms specifically for use in anal sex. The Gates Foundation has also given Origami money " to improve the health of people in the developing world." So let's be clear about what Rand Paul is mocking when he mocks the Origami condom: He's mocking a chance for women in the developing world to have some control over their sexual choices. He's mocking a new attempt to staunch the spread of STDs, and to help control unwanted pregnancy. He's using another epidemic as a joke to distract audiences from the fact that his own party is responsible for the mishandling of Ebola in the United States. He's being a total fucking asshole.

* I don't think that Daily Show conversation between Jon Stewart and O'Reilly is especially good. It's poorly edited, for one thing, and it devolves almost immediately into the kind of screaming match that Jon Stewart used to rail against as bad for public discourse. Most of the fault for that falls on O'Reilly, of course, but Stewart's friendly tolerance of O'Reilly doesn't help matters any.