Rand Paul
US Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., brought up Adolf Hitler during his Senate filibuster on the nomination of Paul Brennan for CIA director, but the Tea Party darling refused to connect the dots between the dictator and President Obama. Reuters

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., brought up Adolf Hitler during his Senate filibuster Wednesday on the nomination of John Brennan for CIA director, but the tea party darling refused to connect the dots between the dictator and President Obama.

Paul began filibustering Brennan’s nomination around 11:45 a.m. EST and is still going strong.

Much of Paul’s bloviating has been about the Obama administration’s response on drone strikes. Paul sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking if drone strikes of American citizens on American soil are legal, and Holder said he could conceive of extraordinary circumstances where the tactic could be used – for an attack on the country that rose to the level of Pearl Harbor or Sept. 11.

Paul departed from his nonstop talk on drones to talk about economic conditions in Germany prior to Hitler’s rise to power.

“It was a chaotic situation,” the Kentucky senator said. “Out of that chaos, Hitler was elected democratically. They elected him out of this chaos.”

Paul addressed how some of Obama’s critics have compared the president to Hitler, saying he felt it was an inappropriate analogy.

“The point isn’t that anybody in our country is Hitler. I’m not accusing anybody of being that evil,” he said. “I think it’s an overplayed and misused analogy. But what I am saying is that in a democracy, you could someday elect someone who is very evil. That’s why we don’t give the power to the government. And it’s not an accusation of this president or anybody in this body. It’s a point to be made that occasionally even a democracy gets it wrong.”

You can watch the rest of Paul’s filibuster (the senator said he would be speaking until he’s physically unable to carry on) here.