Lol@ all the people who are actually afraid of drone attacks on US soil.

Adjust your tinfoil hats and pretend you know what you're talking about lol.

If it were George W. Bush you'd be upset.

Indeed... 

I don't think half of you are aware that there is an initiative circulating to have 30,000 drones over the U.S. by 2020 (Google it). Drones are used for two things: Spying and assassinating. And no, neither are particularly cool, especially when these things are going to be over our heads. It's one thing to deploy them in war zones, it's a whole other matter to deploy them over innocent civilians at home. 

Drop the b/s politics, people. Just because Obama is doing it, doesn't make it cool. By God if G.W. Bush was doing this exact same thing, every Democrat would be up in arms just as they were when the PATRIOT Act was being signed. Sure, Republicans were mum during that, but now is the time we can come together and really examine these issues. 

Yeah, because it's A-OK to kill anyone else in the world without due process. And all those criteria have nothing to do with drones.

What a pathetic piece of political theatre. People getting all in a lather about drones are just grandstanding. Dead is dead, assassinated is assassinated, the device used to deliver the fatal hit is irrelevant.

If there ever comes a time when the president can order the military to start taking out US citizens on US soil then drones are going to be the least of America's problems.

There's nothing politically or militarily to be gained by the military making a drone strike on Donald Trump's mansion when they can simply rock up there with a federal agent and a warrant and arrest him. If the Don then proceeds to pull out a few rocket launchers and M60s and starts firing on the feds, then drone away I say.

Of course having drones would have made Rambo: First Blood a rather short and uninteresting movie.

I'd be puking at his smarmy delivery "I'm the decider goddamit!!!", but other than that GWB woulda been as entitled as Obama to kill his own people in whatever way he deems best, under the right circumstances.

@DCOK yes, spying on national parks to map the flora and find noxious pest plants to seek and destroy, or use them to spy on people lost in the wilderness and likely to die if they are not found. Awful awful drones, should be banned forever, or at least whenever there's a Democratic president.

13 hours of time wasting fidddling over drones.

That he managed to talk about drones for almost the whole time is impressive. But nothing else about his grandstanding.

Rand Paul's entire deluded, fear mongering premise is that Barack Obama will execute drone strike WITHIN the US, targeting americans out of nowhere, for no legitimate reason. Do you know how STUPID that sounds lol. Read that back to yourself, and realize how INSANE you have to be in order to actually support anything rand paul says.

John Mccain And Lindsey Graham tore into Rand Paul for being a deluded wacko, trying to stir up fear and paranoia. Too many uninformed americans reacting to headlines, as opposed to the actual story.

Oh, and the entire 13 hour mess was useless lol. The CIA director got CONFIRMED. What a big waste of time.

Well, dead is dead, but the method is not entirely irrelevant. Drones are the latest and perhaps the ultimate in the mechinzation and impersonalization of warfare. It's no coincidence that it wasn't until the advent of drones that an administration actually took the step of drawing up a secret kill list that includes its country's own citizens.

Well, I don't personally favor Obama's patronizing and pseudo-professorial delivery ("Let me be clear: what is true is, hem haw hem haw, don't I sound thoughtful?") any more than I did Bush's faux-tough guy nonsense, but that's a matter of personal taste. The fact is that Bush was made out to be the annihilator of all civil liberties for warrantless wire-tapping and enhanced interrogations. Senator Obama specifically denounced both of these things, but as president not only has he continued them (whatever he says to the contrary about the interrogations, he has continued the practice of rendition), but now he claims the right to kill without due process - something even the awful Bush administration judged to be a bridge too far. And, amazingly, there had been less public controversy over this than there was about the idea that Bush might be listening in on your phone calls. This despite the fact that, you know, the denial of life is the denial of all civil liberties.

You seem to think that Rand Paul droned on about drones and nothing else for 13 hours straight, but had you actually listened to any of it you would have discovered that he spent the majority that time talking about the utter lack of due process involved in the administration's newly invented powers of assassination and how that conflicts with the Fifth Amendment. That lack of due process is, of course, the primary problem, but under this program it is facilitated by the convenience and anonymity of drones so it becomes difficult to talk about one without talking about the other.

This gets more entertaining by the minute. Obama has now drawn up a secret kill list? You must be wearing tin foil underware as well as a tinfoil hat.

I already gave you a perfectly good worked example of the circumstances under which Obama could legitimately take out Donald Trump with a drone strike.

Gimme a break with the depersonalising rhetoric. You think the carpet bombing od Dresden and London, or the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bombers looking at the whites in their victims' eyes? There's no difference in the connection between those bombers and their victims and the remote drone pilot and their victims. The only difference is that the drone pilot isn't risking death. But that's irrelevant to the depersonalisation of the act of killing a large number of people during a single bombing run.

Due process is important, but merely asserting that the president can authorise the stealth killing of an American does not equate to intent to violate due process.

It was still nothing but grandstanding and posturing. He thinks we extracted some sort of backing off from Holder, but in reality Holder merely confirmed the administrations position. Then Rand went pee and let the confirmation proceed. End result nothing's changed.

And there's no hew and cry over the revelation that the govt can kill it's own people, because it's not a revelation. As opposed to warrantless wiretapping, which most people naively thought they were safe from.

Typed on my phone with auto complete so please excuse any odd word useage.

Thank You. 

You, myself and one other guy have been the ONLY people to actually point out what Rand Paul was doing. Everyone else is using idealogical rhetoric as a defense mechanism for their complete lack of understanding. By the way, turn on the news and every politcal talking head is treating Rand Paul as he should be treated for these comments, a joke.

It's one big joke... "stand with rand." How about "take a college course WITHOUT rand." Lol...idunno.

I'm not American and don't know enough about American politics to get involved in this whole debate, but this I disagree with.

Being in a plane over a city and being in an air-conditioned trailer thousands of kilometers away watching your targets on a low res screen are different things in terms of the psychological connection involved.

And the removal of the risk of losing a pilot reduces the aversion to war. It becomes easier to justify with less risk to one's own.  Depersonalisation applies not just to the victim, but to the executor as well. Without drones there would have been far fewer targeted strikes over the last decade.