3/07/2013

Random Observations on Rand Paul's Filibuster:
1. Fine, fine, fuck it, fine, yeah, it's groovy that Sen. Rand Paul started and led a talking, real filibuster on the Senate floor yesterday for 13 hours. Yeah, sure, cool, it's even groovier that it was over Attorney General Eric Holder's letter stating that President Obama can kill the fuck out of you with a drone on U.S. soil in extraordinary" circumstances, which always seem to get less "extra" and more "ordinary" as time goes by. We need to be talking about this more, a lot more. Oh, and Paul was holding up a vote, which will happen, confirming John "Loves Drones Like They're Dildos" Brennan as CIA director.

But, you know, mostly, fuck Rand Paul with a polar bear's dick. Watching people support that odious bastard, who always looks like he just smoked a bong after fucking the facehole of a midget blow-up doll in his office, because this one time he was on the right side of things is like listening to someone say how cool it is when the Westboro Baptist Church shows up to protest stuff you hate, too. (Hey, they're gonna be protesting a Catholic church in Kansas on Monday because they're against child rape. Can you overlook the "God Hates Fags" signs to join them?)

2. It's hard to pick the worst moment of the entire thing. Was it when Sen. Ted Cruz did the whitest Def Poetry Jam performance by reading a long, long series of tweets worshiping Paul ("Today Rand Paul is my hero"), the rhetorical equivalent of an epic blow job, the opening of the Paul/Cruz 2016 presidential campaign to Hell? Or was it when Sen. Marco Rubio quoted Wiz Khalifa, Jay-Z, and The Godfather around midnight, thus securing the votes of all the cool kids at the next CPAC, although one might imagine that Wiz Khalifa and Jay-Z might not appreciate all of Rubio's Obama dissing? Or was it Cruz fingering Paul's prostate by praising him with "And I'm pretty certain--for the record, I can confirm that no teleprompter was in front of the senator from Kentucky's desk"?

3. Gotta say this; Rand Paul did more to justify the efforts of the actual liberal media than the mainstream media has in a long time. Look at the people he referenced: Conor Friedersdorf, Spencer Ackerman, Eugene Robinson, Charles Pierce, and Glenn Greenwald, just to name a few. Granted, he often used them as examples of liberals who slam other supposed liberals over their excusing of drone warfare, but, still, Paul gave street cred to many writers that the GOP usually ignores because, like so much of our political agenda and rhetoric, it's only valid when the right makes it valid.

4. Sadly, it wasn't the subject of the filibuster that people were thrilled about. It was the fact that a talking filibuster was occurring. The meta-action was more important than what was being acted on. To that end, Sen. Jeff Merkley was right when he said, "If a person’s going to make a stand on a nomination, this is the way to do it—the way Sen. Paul is doing it. The American people can watch this and weigh in on whether he’s a hero or a bum. That’s reasonable. That honors the traditions of the Senate." He was contrasting this with the bullshit use of the filibuster that has stopped the work of the Senate and that some Democrats would like to get rid of. Yeah, it was striking and kind of great to see a real filibuster, but not if we treat it like Bob Hope walking onto The Tonight Show unannounced. (Look it up, kids.)

5. The real effect of Paul's effort will be if, in the next few weeks, the Senate actually does something about the President's power to kill Americans, at least, with drones. You know, like take some fucking responsibility and pass legislation that limits it since Bush and Obama have based their imperial presidential powers on the vague wording of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that started the Afghanistan war. But that means that someone might have had to listen to the words, not just the fact that the noise was being made.