Senator Rand Paul just spent thirteen hours filibustering the nomination of John O. Brennan as CIA director. Brennan’s a shitbird, no doubt, but anybody who gives a damn is a fool. Anybody who runs the CIA is going to serve the the Cathedral under the direction of the chief executive. It’s equally bad news for us, whoever it is. Arguably, the worse, the better, as far as the Remnant’s interests are concerned.
But Brennan’s quality as a nominee is not what Rand was excited about. He wanted a clarification of the administration’s position on using drones to kill American citizens on American soil without due process[1]. That’s a point that interests me even less than the initials of the CIA director: What matters is that this administration will use drones to kill people like me at will just as soon as they think it won’t panic their real base of support. Their public position is arbitrary jaw music, the absolute minimum they feel they have to say to shut people up.
Well, OK, but Rand Paul just pushed that minimum back a little bit. It was a more successful stunt than I figured it could be. He appears to have gained some support on the filibuster from Cathedral supporters. Not anybody who matters, mind you — just useful idiots. But even that much is noteworthy nowadays. It’s a small but real victory, of a sort. Of course it’s a drop in a rainstorm, meaningless and forgotten by this time next week.
Here’s what’s sad, though. Paul was holding the nomination hostage until the administration gave him a straight answer to a simple question: Does the president believe he has the authority to order Americans killed without charge or trial on American soil, the way he picks kill-list line items to execute on foreign soil?
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney quoted from the letter that Holder sent to Paul today. “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on an American soil?” Holder wrote, per Carney. “The answer is no.”
Paul said that was good enough for him. “I’m quite happy with the answer,” he said during a CNN interview. “I’m disappointed it took a month and a half and a root canal to get it, but we did get the answer.”
Ever been there, in your earliest blue pill days, high school or college? Some idiot girlfriend was treating you worse and worse, and you got finally fixated on her refusal to give you a straight answer to some stupid question. You dug in and made a huge root-canal issue out of it. She finally grudgingly gave you a one-word bullshit answer, just to shut you up. And you thought, momentarily, that you’d finally made some progress. You “made her promise”! Like that meant something. HA HA HA. Oh, that blue pill mindset. Funny stuff. Funny like black ice in a fog.
Looking back, you realize what an ass you made of yourself, and that you had absolutely no power in that relationship, or really the broken rubble of that relationship. If you had to ask that question at all, much less fight like hell just to get a bullshit answer, she despised you. It was over already. The only thing for you to do was get out.
Well, we can’t.
[1] Althouse is good on this:
Why would someone professing to care about the Constitution only want to know that an American has to be charged with a crime before he’s blown away by something called a drone. Where’s the right to counsel? Where’s the proof beyond a reasonable doubt at trial? And if the sentence is death, isn’t it cruel and unusual to suddenly bomb a man out of existence?
The Senator sounds as though he is begging for the last shred of pretense that we have a Constitution.
Of course, there’s nothing cruel or unusual about being suddenly bombed out of existence. I’d infinitely prefer that to the gas chamber or electric chair. But the rest is good.
Grey Lagoons 