She takes a lot of heat, but her column on the conservative hawk response to Rand Paul’s filibuster is sheer excellence. The two best paragraphs:

Conservative hawks sought to divide Paul from the larger GOP on his broader national security vision rather than find some commonality with his insistence on a straight answer from this administration. It is not loony or delusional or irrelevant to require a president, who has been so cavalier with the truth and so willing to aggrandize executive power, to acknowledge some limit on his authority; it is disturbing that the administration had to be humiliated into providing an answer about domestic drone use against non-combatant Americans. …

Hawks have been remarkably inept lately in public diplomacy and in putting some fences around political theory. They have stopped making cogent arguments for some policies either because either there are none (really is there some justification for continuing to pump up the Muslim Brotherhood?) or because like other conservatives they are trapped in an echo chamber. I will put this bluntly: They now face a Rand Paul problem because they did not construct a sound, reasonable national security policy that would endure over time. In short, they lost the public and now they are panicked that Paul may win the party and the country over.

I’m surely more dovish than Rubin on a lot of things. And I wouldn’t mind seeing Paul win over both the party and the country. But her broader goal here, charting a tough foreign policy that still respects our civil liberties and holds the executive branch accountable, is one we all ought to seek.