Nothing screams Im a libertarian like a creepy, cultish, rhyming campaign slogan, dont you think? Something like Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream, Sen. Rand Pauls new motto (as leaked to Politico), teasing the kickoff to his 2016 presidential campaign?

Cant you imagine glassy-eyed, libertarian-minded Millennials chanting that slogan, maybe wearing some kind of military-style yet vaguely hipsterish campaign uniform?

No, actually, I cant either. Rhyming slogans dont say libertarian to me; Pauls tweet seemed weirdly authoritarian, in fact. But on the eve of Pauls announcing a 2016 presidential run, nothing makes sense about his campaign branding, or the way the media simply accept it, in all its messy, massively self-contradictory glory.

So I write to give my colleagues one simple tip to improve their Paul campaign coverage: Stop calling him a libertarian. Stop it right now.

And a related piece of advice: Stop reflexively insisting hes going to appeal to supposedly libertarian-minded Millennials. Because hes not.

Robert Draper didnt create the Paul charade, but he seriously helped it along, in his New York Times magazine piece on the nations supposed libertarian moment last August. He saw the moment well-captured by Rand Paul, who was to the libertarian movement what Pearl Jam is to rock, Draper wrote, explaining.On issues including same-sex marriage, surveillance and military intervention, his positions more closely mirror those of young voters than those of the G.O.P. establishment.

Many good reporters and analysts have spent many long hours debunking Drapers assumptions. (I tried it here.) On issues of womens rights and LGBT rights, immigration, drug legalization and even military spending and intervention, Paul has either always been or has become a fairly standard issue Republicans.

Think Progresss Judd Legum runs exhaustively through the record, but here are a few highlights. First of all, hes staunchly anti-choice, supporting the Life begins at Conception Act and pretty much every other piece of anti-abortion legislation thats come before him. Hes got a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. To be fair, other libertarians have gotten away with being pro-liberty for everyone but women. Pauls father Ron, who was somewhat more genuinely libertarian than his son, likewise supported draconian anti-abortion laws.

And while Paul used to sound vaguely live-and-let-live when it came to gay marriage, he has toughened his rhetoric. He now says the idea of a marriage between a same-sex couples offends myself and a lot of people, and hes joined Rick Santorum in suggesting it may lead to interspecies intimacy. We learned last week that he doesnt even believe in the concept of gay rights, telling an interviewer in 2013, I really dont believe in rights based on your behavior.

Where libertarians tend to support liberalizing immigration laws and promoting more open borders, Paul has voted against any liberalization of U.S. immigration policy. He even cosponsored a bill with Sen. David Vitter to end citizenship rights for the children of foreigners born on this soil, when he first got to the Senate. Citizenship is a privilege, Paul said at the time, and only those who respect our immigration laws should be allowed to enjoy its benefits.

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Stop calling this man a libertarian: What 2016 campaign journos miss about Rand Paul