In Which We Wait For Rand Paul To Have To Pee

Hey! Check out C-SPAN2! Sen. Rand Paul has been talking, without pause, since 1997, and today he accidentally wandered in front of a microphone, and now the Senate can't vote on John Brennan becoming CIA director!

After 115 cloture motions in the 112th Congress (not including that time Mitch McConnell filibustered... himself ), we finally get to see an actual filibuster! Where people aretalking! (Obligatory fist-bump to Bernie Sanders, who did this rigamarole in 2010, but we have had a LOT of bull-pucky procedural filibusters since then.)

Paul has been droning (HA!) on since about noon, about how it's a little weird that nobody will tell him whether or not Oberma is gonna kill Americans with his drones, and whether it can happen on U.S. soil, and whether Congress can please, please have some oversight. He seems particularly concerned about a hypothetical man in a café somewhere. According to Paul, that café guy is TOAST.

Eric Holder sent Paul a letter yesterday being all like "listen, we can drone Americans to death in their homes, but, like, it would have to bereal badfor that to happen," and now Paul is all like "WTF, mate?" and has been stretching out his answers realllllly loooooonggggg.

So now today Paul stands up and says, "It's filibuster time, motherlickers," and he's been talking and talking about freedom ever since. To be fair, hehashad a break or two, because every few minutes Ted Cruz says he has a question (which, procedurally, doesn't end the filibuster), and then Cruz just talks about how it's the 177th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo. It has to be a question, though, so then Cruz just says, "Was that nice? Did you like that?" and Paul stops peeing in a Snapple bottle behind the podium and starts talking again.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden jumped in to ask a 45-minute question while we were writing this, though it's not very questiony, and he said something about how American prisons are full of terrorists.

We honestly wanted him to stop, because his hairline was messing up our television, and Paul is way better at this. He sounds so good, being like, "Seriously? We can just kill people now?" because his use of "fighting for freedom" here is not the kind of "freedom" where churchy people get to take pills away from women, it's the kind where the government doesn't kill us.

It is our humble opinion, Sen. Rand, that you are a most eloquentoptometristophthalmologist, and you sound very nice talking about military drones, and you should stick to that. You sound much better than when you are talking about abortion drones, and food stamp drones, and Department of Education drones, dropping knowledge on defenseless children.

Giant flying killer robots are a good thing to be protecting Americans from, whereas first-grade teachers are probably not as deadly. Let's keep fighting against "worldwide war, basically forever," like you just explained. Keep on truckin', sir —Marco Rubio will be there any minute with a bottle of water for you.

(We were going to make that tired Rubio joke, but then RUBIO HIMSELF grabbed a microphone and made it for us. Alas.)