Last week a Republican Senator filibustered on civil liberties in wartime -- and, get this, he was in favor of them! This remarkable event drew such attention that the filibusterer, Rand Paul, ended the week talking about running for President.

How did our friends the rightbloggers -- who generally think that worrying about the rights of terrorists is something only Democrats and Frenchmen do -- react to Paul's speech? Mostly they loved it, even when they disagreed with Paul's cause.

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Last week we learned that a White House official got into an argument with Bob Woodward. Woodward is the biggest name in Washington journalism; he has survived seven Administrations (counting the one he helped take down with his Watergate reporting), and will probably continue to publish bestsellers into the Tripp Palin Administration.

Nonetheless rightbloggers rushed to defend Woodward -- many for the first time in their lives -- and to assert that this argument meant Obama was at war with the press (with whom he is usually in bed) and a tyrant.

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Did you miss the Day of Resistance? Don't even know what it is? Well, it was a tea-party style throwdown last Saturday, in which thousands of your fellow citizens went packing in public to give Kenyan Pretender Obama the old cold-dead-hands salute.

You might expect our friends the rightbloggers would have something to say about it. A bunch of them did, before it took place, and at great and amusing length. But when the guns came out, they went suspiciously quiet.

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Last Tuesday was the State of the Union address, in which the President laid out a bunch of plans and Republicans denounced them. Rightbloggers got into this with the aplomb you'd expect.

But when rising GOP star Marco Rubio had a comical moment in his official Republican response, and people had the temerity to laugh at it, rightbloggers sped past partisan bickering and straight into persecution mania.

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NBC recently brought to light the Obama Administration's policy of conducting drone attacks on civilians "even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S." so long as "an informed, high-level" official thinks they're warranted.

This is apparently approved even against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, as the Authorization of Use of Military Force signed by President Bush in 2001 "does not set forth an express geographical limitation on the use of force it authorizes," per the Administration's white paper.

This put rightbloggers into an uproar -- not because they're against this sort of thing, though some of them did a fair job of pretending. No, they were mad because Obama was getting away with something that they just knew they'd do a much better job of getting away with.

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We have observed once or twice before that, at this point, President Obama seems to be trolling his opposition. The thickness with which he laid on the contraception issues at last year's Democratic Convention, for example, seemed ill-advised until the general conservative flip-out (and Obama's reelection) made it look brilliant.

The recent gun control furor seems to be similarly engineered. Whenever Obama makes a mild move in the anti-gun direction -- like his nothingburger executive actions a few weeks back -- the brethren go berserk, and ordinary Americans looking at the two sides are encouraged to think Obama's isn't the crazy one.

Last week, damned if Obama didn't do it again, with first an assertion and then photographic evidence that he had been skeet-shooting at Camp David.

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Since the 2012 Presidential election, conservatives have been trying to think up ways to revive their movement. Last week a number of them approached the subject, including George F. Will (basically you're doing great don't change anything), Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (basically you're doing great just change the marketing), and the Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein (basically you're doing great just maybe let them smoke weed).

Rightbloggers pitched in, too, in direct responses or in reactions to Hillary Clinton's Congressional hearing, the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and gun control, proving that whatever lesson there is to be learned from 2012, they will do whatever it takes not to find it.

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Last week President Obama, inspired by December's Newtown shootings, announced 23 executive actions, and proposed some legislation, to address gun violence. The actions are rather mild ("Require criminal background checks for all gun sales," "Nominate an ATF Director," etc.) and the legislation probably won't go much of anywhere. So you might imagine rightbloggers would just declare victory and move on to some other outrage.

Not a chance. Anything Obama does about guns, however toothless, presents an opportunity for the brethren to rouse some of their less compos mentis followers. In fact, some of the rightbloggers seem less than stable on the subject themselves.

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Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. Hagel is a former Republican Senator, so you would expect Republicans to appreciate the gesture. Or you would if you lived in the earlier, simpler time before rightbloggers. In our current era, alas, nothing proposed by the Kenyan Pretender can be less than treasonous -- in this case treasonous to Israel, which was admitted to the Union about the time Norman Podhoretz endorsed Pat Robertson.

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Recently at The Week, right-wing author Matt K. Lewis penned a provocative column called "The Culture War Is Over, and Conservatives Lost." He was echoing what many rightbloggers have been saying since the recent election -- that after two consecutive victories by the Kenyan Pretender, conservatives ought to consider that the average America might not actually hate homosexuals, contraception, and Big Gummint, and that the right's "culture war" (Wikipedia entry here, for those fortunate enough never to have heard of it) might be a losing proposition.

But we're skeptical. Maybe they'd give up if the culture war were really meant to sway ordinary Americans, since in that regard it's apparently no longer useful. But in the Age of Obama II, it would seem that culture war is actually a sort of make-work project for rightbloggers. And if they do it right, they can even get people to pay for it.

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