Posted by MikeT23 on 3/7/2013 3:02:00 PM (view original):
Posted by burnsy483 on 3/7/2013 2:42:00 PM (view original):
Posted by examinerebb on 3/7/2013 2:32:00 PM (view original):
I'm sure it was Rand trying to up his profile. That said, it should be hard for anyone not to be concerned that the U.S. government has said that they can kill American citizens on American soil without due process, and has given almost no guidelines under which that power may or may not be executed. Whatever his reasons for doing it may be, and as ridiculous as the idea of fillibuster may be, there are more people demanding answers about those drone strikes today than there were two days ago. I'm not sure how else that level of national awareness could have been acheived.
That's fair, actually. You believe in a particular issue so much, and this is a way to gain attention for it.
The issue on what he was talking about isn't my point, though. The filibuster itself is a waste of time. If the filibuster was illegal, I'm confident Rand would have found another way to draw attention to the issue.
Fair, maybe.
But, in today's media-driven world, getting attention to a cause isn't difficult. I'm sure there was another way. But it was effective.
I hear what you're saying, but I think today's media-driven world makes us numb to a lot of what we hear/read/see. We're getting different information on different topics via a crapload of different television stations, radio stations, news websites, Twitter, Facebook, etc. And just about none of it is without an agenda. A couple of times I've dismissed a story initially, then later pulled an "Oh, **** - that was true." He ground government to a halt (symbolically), and that made a ton of different people with different agendas want to know why. He could have held a press conference, but that's not making the top half of any non-Libertarian news website. I doubt it would have appeared anywhere on my local 6:00 television news. Short of standing at the gates of the white house naked with an RPG, it would have been difficult to get the spotlight where he got it by way of the fillibuster.
That said, I think the fillibuster rule itself is ridiculous.