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Rand Paul has a better chance of being elected president than his father ever had. That’s partly because he’s more willing to play the pragmatic party political game, but it’s also partly because he’s not the doctrinaire libertarian that his father generally was.

Paul’s filibuster in the U.S. Senate Wednesday was nothing but political theater, but it ended up achieving something unexpected. It flushed out some of the highest-ranking Republicans and forced them to show the disdain they feel whenever individual liberties are concerned.

Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham not only didn’t support Paul, but they spent Thursday actively attacking him. McCain took to the Senate floor to attack Paul’s concern that the Obama administration would ever use drone strikes on Americans inside the borders of the country. Graham not only attacked Paul, but praised Obama’s use of drone strikes to kill people on the other side of the world.

After starting his filibuster alone Wednesday, Paul was eventually joined by a few Republican senators and one Democratic senator. While they talked about constitutional rights and lambasted the Obama administration for its refusal to say that it didn’t have legal authority to unilaterally kill Americans in this country, where were McCain and Graham?

They were with the Republican establishment having dinner with Obama.

If you’re one of the many conservatives who believe that the Republican Party is your savior when it comes to battling big government, think again. There’s a small core of GOP politicians who are somewhat more likely to be on the side of individual freedom than the statist old guard is, but those who believe in freedom are a minority in their own party.

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I just read the the Navy’s Blue Angels are going to cancel their flying shows this year because of budget cuts. I’m really upset about this.

If there’s no budget deal by midnight tonight, about $85 billion in budget cuts will kick in. For weeks, I’ve been bombarded with stories about how “draconian” these cuts will be. Even though everybody has known for months that the cuts are coming, Barack Obama and congressional Republicans act like teen-agers in cars playing chicken near a cliff.

Even though Obama gets to decide what cuts are made, he calls them “dumb, arbitrary cuts” that are “unnecessary and inexcusable.”

For instance, Joe Biden isn’t going to be able to fly home on the weekends aboard his Air Force jet. Instead, he’s going to have to go back to riding an Amtrak train. This is horrible. It’s upsetting. How could we let such a thing happen?

Various federal agencies are telling their employees that they’ll be taking one unpaid day off every week through the end of the year unless a budget deal is reached. (The IRS is delaying this particular cut until after tax season, so you can tell what their priorities are.) How will we possibly survive with a 20 percent reduction in the hours worked by these various bureaucrats? It’s outrageous that they won’t be in their offices doing … well, whatever it is that they do.

The White House wants to apply maximum pressure on Congress to keep spending, so it has released a list of what cuts will hit each and every state. Here’s the list of cuts that I’m supposed to be scared about here in Alabama, for instance. And I am. I’m terrified.

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It was a year ago this morning that I had surgery to remove a cancerous lump in my left breast. In a way, it seems as though it was just a few weeks ago. In another way, though, it seems as though it was in another lifetime.

When the hospital gave me the paperwork outlining everything I needed to know about the surgery and how to be prepared for it, the pages were filled with pictures of smiling patients. When I arrived at the waiting area before surgery at 6 a.m. on Jan. 30, 2012, I didn’t see any smiling faces. I saw the faces of people who were just as scared as I was.

It’s a surreal experience to be going through the motions of preparing for something such as surgery. In a way, it was very normal, because I had a checklist of tasks to accomplish before I got there. Mostly, though, it felt as though I was stepping into a world that I’d been able to avoid for all the years of my life until then. If it’s not overly dramatic to say so, it felt like preparing for death.

There was no reason for me to think that morning that I was about to die, but the experience was so foreign — as well as cold and antiseptic — that it was oddly reminiscent of what it must feel like to prepare to die. I can’t even explain that. It’s more something I feel. It was very cold and impersonal. More than anything, I felt very alone.

An old friend brought me to the hospital and waited for me. When the nurses were ready for me to come to the pre-op area to get ready, I left her behind with other people’s families and friends and entered a world that felt like death’s waiting room. I had to take off all of my clothes and put them into a bag. I dressed in a gown with hospital socks and a net over my head. One of the anesthesiologists connected a plastic tube to my arm.

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