Richard Moore

A couple of points about yesterday's filibuster.

The first thing is, of course, to salute Sen. Rand Paul for his stand for the U.S. Constitution in general and against the Obama administration's drone policy in particular. You can agree with Sen. Paul or not – and I do more often than not – but either way he has struck a renewed blow for intellectual integrity.

Such integrity is desperately lacking in our political parties, and especially so on the left. It was interesting to see so-called progressive Democrats in the Senate silent on the sidelines as Tea Party senators made the case they once would have supported. As Paul himself said, when Barack Obama was in the Senate, that Barack Obama would have been standing with him yesterday. Now the Democrats must toe the party line.

Ditto for the so-called youthful activists who follow Obama so faithfully. Once upon a time, they would have been in the streets marching. In fact, young people in the sixties were in the streets marching against what they believed was Johnson's immoral war policy, no matter what other positions Johnson took that they would agree with, say, on the Great Society or the War on Poverty. They had intellectual integrity. Unlike that generation, today's young people, and the left as a whole, believe in a kind of strange and circular moral equivalency: It's OK if our guy does it, because if he is doing it, it must be good.

There's no intellectual integrity, in other words. That trait is a rare breed these days, but Sen. Paul put it on display yesterday.

As for some who said this was all much ado about nothing, for the government would never really employ such strikes against uncharged and untried citizens, I have but two words for them: Waco, Texas. If a government is capable of massacring nearly 100 people, including children, for no justifiable reason, then it is surely capable of launching a drone for no justifiable reason. Especially when dim-witted, pin-headed bureaucrats are the ones making the decisions.

A clearly stated and idiot-proof constitutional prohibition is needed.