Ryan Lizza talks to 2 witnesses to the notorious Aqua Buddha incident that's been dogging Rand Paul.

From the long — read the whole thing — piece in The New Yorker titled "The Revenge of Rand Paul/The Senator has fought to go mainstream with the ideology that he shares with his father. How far can that strategy take him?":

[During] the 2010 Senate race... GQ.com posted a report in which an anonymous source said that Paul and another NoZe brother had taken her from her apartment, encouraged her to smoke pot, and asked her to pray to something called Aqua Buddha.

The NoZe Brotherhood was a group at Baylor University that "was founded in the nineteen-twenties mostly to mock Baylor’s clubs and fraternities and to satirize its earnest religiosity." Lizza uncovers GQs source, Kristy Ditzler, and talks to her, and he also talks to Paul's confederate, George Paul (who doesn't seem to be related to Rand, despite the last name).

Ditzler is a Democrat who told Lizza she's "speaking up" because she "was a little bit irked by him making himself out to be all about God and country and all about conservative values, because he was clearly not promoting that when I knew him." Nevertheless, she was "appalled" (Rizza's word) at the way the Aqua Buddha story was distorted. She says: “They did pretend they were abducting me, but it wasn’t a forced sort of thing... It was weird, with all of these tents with bongs inside and piles of clothing. Completely bizarro."

Ditzler said that George and Rand asked her to go into one of the tents and smoke pot, but when she declined they drove to a creek in Elm Mott, north of Waco, and told her to wade into the water and worship Aqua Buddha. “They never explained what was going on, but that’s the way they were about everything—vague and mysterious.”

George Paul says that "they took her to a dark pub, where they had an easel set up and pretended to sketch a portrait of her while reading Kant — but he insisted that no drugs were involved...."

He also said that the Aqua Buddha incident took place on another night, when he and Paul blindfolded Ditzler and several other members of their swim team by putting cotton in their goggles, and then loaded them into the back of a pickup and drove to the creek, where they were asked to “pay homage to the Aqua Buddha, and then we all went swimming.” He explained that Aqua Buddha was an inside joke on the swim team. During practice, George, Rand, and others would descend to the bottom of the pool and strike a Buddha pose, creating an amusing sight for swimmers at the surface. “It broke the monotony and helped us get through the workout,” he told me.

That's practically wholesome. What are the lingering questions here? Drug use? After Obama, are we even going to talk about politicians using drugs in their distant past? The insincerity of Rand Paul's religion? He was in a college group that was founded to (Lizza's words) "satirize" the "earnest religiosity" they saw around them. I guess I should do my own research into the NoZe Brotherhood, but I'll just end this here by saying that satirizing earnest religiosity is what Jesus did.