Rand Paul and President Obama basically agree on drones

Examine their statements, and you'll see their differences are largely semantic

Rand Paul
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Supposedly, we're in the middle of a titanic intellectual debate over our government's counterterrorism strategy and drone program. And the two sides of this debate are supposedly personified by President Barack Obama and Sen. Rand Paul.

Paul won headlines for protesting America's drone program by leading a symbolic 13-hour filibuster that delayed the confirmation of the president's nominee to head the CIA. The president, in his counterterrorism address last week, pushed back against some of the claims that he has violated civil liberties, arguing that there already is "strong oversight of all lethal action" and that "citizenship should no more serve as a shield" for terrorist plotters "than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team." Soon after, Paul mocked the process used to identity terrorist targets as "looking at some flash cards, and a PowerPoint presentation on Terror Tuesdays in the White House."

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Bill Scher is the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com and the online campaign manager at Campaign for America's Future. He is the author of Wait! Don't Move To Canada!: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America, a regular contributor to Bloggingheads.tv and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show weekly podcast.