Libertarians are having a moment or something, and there is much excitement over the possibility of a presidential run by a bizarrely coiffed amateur ophthalmologist and civil-rights opponent. How could he be more obnoxious? By staking his candidacy on Silicon Valley brogrammers.

Via HuffPo, folksy conservative Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is opening up a political shop in the San Francisco Bay area, because that's where you go to pitch a dud product to monied dumbasses looking for stupid investments:

Paul told the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday that he plans to travel to the San Francisco area frequently but had no specific plans for when he would open the office. He hinted that he would use connections in Silicon Valley "to win," but declined to elaborate on what that meant.

"There's a lot of smart people in Silicon Valley, and we want to use their brains to figure out how to win," he said.

Not that this should be a surprise, seeing as how Silicon Valley makes the list of most conservative metro areas in America on the strength of every overcompensated cyber bro's belief that he's the living incarnation of Howard Roark and Francisco D'Anconia. These days, Mark Zuckerberg is shilling for Chris Christie, and PayPal tycoon Peter Thiel is an anarcho-capitalist who will either have a Paul family member for president or a private movable island on which to stage monkey knife fights.

"Paul has already made overtures to Silicon Valley and has tried to square his libertarian philosophy with technological advocates," HuffPo says.

That may sound hard. But in fact, Paul is like a priest who can offer the Peninsula's robber barons a perfect absolution for their sins. If ever there was a scene to typify libertarianism in the 21st century, it's a bunch of rich white glassholes getting richer off internet transactions and user data while an unlicensed physician and red-state senator gathers them in the Yerba Buena W Hotel to bitch about government encroachments on personal privacy. If you want a picture of the future, imagine Rand Paul blowing into a tech bubble forever.

[Photo credit: AP]