A key part of campaign law if you plan to run for president requires that you write a book, and it have a boring title. So it should come to no surprise that Tea Party candidate Rand Paul has written several, with such sparkling titles as Government Bullies, The Tea Party Goes To Washington, and Taking A Stand, which I believe is about stealing used Stephen King paperbacks.

However, Government Bullies and The Tea Party Goes To Washington may have some problems, and I’m not just talking about resale value. BuzzFeed recently published a very, very long list of quotations from various founding fathers (with special emphasis on Thomas Jefferson) which Paul employed to liberal (gasp!) effect throughout these two books.  Unfortunately, most of them are fake.

The final line in Paul’s book The Tea Party Goes to Washington is a fake sentiment attributed to Jefferson:

“The Constitution is very clear about it. The Tea Party’s job is to keep making things clearer, and this is only the beginning. It is not a job that will be finished overnight or even in an election cycle. Thomas Jefferson believed that the price of liberty was eternal vigilance — and now the Tea Party must prove it.”

“We currently have no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote” this phrase, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has said of “the price of liberty was eternal vigilance,” which Paul uses twice in his book.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation goes on to politely refute many, many other quotations that Paul attributed to Jefferson, and Buzzfeed points out numerous mysteriously sourced quotations from Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison used by Paul to bolster his small-government position. And this isn’t limited to years-old books, either.

In the past three weeks, Paul has misattributed a quote to former President Abraham Lincoln (a quote he again repeated in a speech today) and used a fake quote from Founding Father Patrick Henry. Previously, Paul used a fake Thomas Jefferson quote in his Senate victory speech.

This may come as no surprise to those of us who recall Paul’s love of plagiarism and ripping off Wikipedia (that godless commie hellhole), but while it’s easy to attribute these laughable and numerous fabrications to a sloppy ghostwriter pandering to a readership that already doesn’t care about what the founding fathers actually did, I would caution against such a reductive interpretation. Paul’s material about Jefferson isn’t strictly limited to bungled quotes. It goes much, much deeper.

I dug out both my first editions of Government Bullies and The Tea Party Goes To Washington and went back through them, this time with a critical eye. And what I found was shocking.

• Paul describes Thomas Jefferson as “such a steadfast believer in small government that he wore a silver thimble on his pinky at all times to remind himself how small government should be and required all his colleagues to do the same by threatening to murder them in their sleep”
• Instead of numbers, the phrase “Obamacare Is A Bunch Of Drone-Loving Puppies Tracking Dirt All Over Your Nice Clean Floor” appears at the corner of every page
• 90% of quotations attributed to John Quincy Adams are actually from the 1970’s television show Quincy
• Benjamin Franklin, who was in reality 5 feet 9 inches tall, is featured in Government Bullies during a 52-page extended action sequence as a 400-foot-tall mecha, powered by an cast-iron engine that burns British revenue tax stamps for fuel and who wiped out the British army singlehandedly
• John Adams’ last words were not “Heaven has a strong, tall border fence”
• The last 30 pages of Government Bullies bizarrely and repeatedly reference that Paul is being pursued by “that Blue Dude”, whom it later turns out is a mailbox
• Government Bullies quote George Washington as saying in an address to the Continental Congress “I think TURN: Washington’s Spies is fucking great. Makes Breaking Bad look like shit. You should watch it. And John Brennan should still be fired.”
• When asked about his most iconic song “Like A Rolling Stone”, Jefferson is quoted as responding “‘It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” This quote is not found in Jefferson’s writings.
• The New Hampshire state motto is not “Live Free Or Die Hard, Preferably In The Woods”
• Thomas Jefferson did not die due to “the tragic collapse of a poorly constructed debt ceiling, which was totally preventable”
• The opening chapter of The Tea Party Goes To Washington, in which Jefferson sets fire to a gay wedding cake, contains several misspellings