Rachel Maddow is using her “report” on the Republican tea caucus blocking the extension of the PATRIOT Act to replay her “interview” with Rand Paul, and rail about abortion. Rant all you want, Rachel, but people are noticing that you haven’t even mentioned the Act several minutes into your tirade.

Is this ad-libbed?

She misses, of course, the real story: which is that the libertarian wing of the GOP is defending what’s left of our civil liberties. There she is with a big Glenn Beck-like chart, explaining that there are two kinds of conservatives: libertarians and authoritarians. According to her — and me — the GOP party establishment has paid lip service to liberty, in the abstract, but in reality it has been quite the opposite. Everybody claims to be a “libertarian,” but when they get into power it’s a different story. Never mind that Democrats vote with them — they started it, according to Rachel. It’s all the Republicans’ fault.

And she still hasn’t mentioned that the Tea Party made the difference on the PATRIOT Act….

C”,mon, Rachel, you’re supposed to be reporting — and maybe even commenting on — the news.

OH WAIT — She’s finally mentioned it, over five minutes into her rant: “26 Republicans bucked their own party on this vote.” It’s “man bites dog” — Republicans voting against the Act “from the right.” And now they’re questioning Afghanistan. “What happens to American politics now?” she asks. “It’s a realignment.”

The evil smirking Thomas Frank is being brought in, at this point, so I’m changing the channel….

But as to what Rachel said about a realignment: that’s right, but it isn’t going to stop there. We’ve been doing our job here at Antiwar.com, reaching out to the Right on foreign policy and civil liberties issues, for fifteen years now, along with many others. That campaign is reaping a harvest, and the resulting cornucopia is going to astonish the country.

UPDATE: Oh,Â and by the way, hours after the PATRIOT Act went down to defeat, Matt Drudge has yet to report it. Instead, we have the red-hot news that a Texas school district is having second thoughts about making the study of Arabic mandatory.

UPDATE 2: On the other side of the divide, the newly-AOL-ized Huffington Post headlines: “Beyond Left and Right: House Defeats Patriot Act Extension,” but the story doesn’t live up to its billing. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is quoted, but not a single Republican who voted “nay,” and the phrase “tea party” is nowhere to be found. Beyond left and right? Not quite.

UPDATE 3: The Washington Post got it right, for once:

“House Republicans suffered an embarrassing setback Tuesday when they fell seven votes short of extending provisions of the Patriot Act, a vote that served as the first small uprising of the party’s tea-party bloc.”