"Release the drones,' said the queen, as she shouted at the top of her voice."
"Release the drones," was Paul's interpolation of the Queen's original order, "Off with her head!" And that's where the Kentucky Senator stopped reading, still solidly rooted in the Wonderland of the U.S. Congress, a collective mad tea party of March hares, mad hatters, and dormice.
The Wonderland quality of Rand Paul's theatre of the imaginary is clear from his focus on the threat that the President might kill Americans on American soil. And, while Paul didn't mention it, the President might also take a feline crouch on his executive branch, smiling down and slowly fading from view till there was nothing left but his smile.
In reality, if this president -- or any president -- decides it's necessary to kill an American on American soil, he will get her done one way or another. But wouldn't a killer drone have made a neater job of it at places like Waco or Ruby Ridge?
Don't Drone Me, Bro --
I'm American!
Given the non-existence of the imagined threat, Paul's performance amounted to little more than a solipsistic ceremony of American exceptionalism, pottering on sometimes incoherently about the fundamental non-threat of killer drones in America despite the paranoid assurance of some Rand Paul followers that the government is coming for them soon. That's why Americans should be exceptions to presidential drone policy, Paul argues, just because we're Americans. He offers no other rationale.
It's not that his argument is wrong -- it's not -- but it's Lilliputian and quite literally narrow-minded. While some now celebrate his filibuster as some sort of defense of civil liberties, it's only a defense of some civil liberties for a few people in a special class of Americans. Despite all the media overplay of this stand-your-ground stand-up routine, such ideological opposites as the Cato Institute and Anti-War.com were unimpressed with a moral argument that singled out only Americans for any sort of due process protection under law.
Why would Americans be concerned with other people in other places getting killed without due process of law? It's not like they're covered by the U.S. Constitution, is it?
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