Florida political blogs are atwitter this morning about how Florida's junior U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio, will be staging a mainstream media offensive this week, beginning with what ABC News is hyping as his "first live national television interview" tomorrow morning on ABC's Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos. But that's preceded by his appearance tonight on the network's Nightline program, airing at 11:30 p.m. And he'll also be appearing on Fox News's Hannity show tonight at 9 p.m. EDT.

On ABC News' website, reporter Jonathan Karl writes that Rubio on Nightline will talk about "the military campaign in Libya, President Obama's leadership, the so-called birther movement and his political plans for 2012 and beyond." He writes that the Senator has taken himself off the board as a presidential candidate in 2012, but is not necessarily resistant to the idea of being considered for vice president.

We're extremely interested in hearing Rubio's take on the Libyan situation, particularly in the light of President Obama's 28-minute address to the nation, in which the commander in chief finally informed Americans about why the military has been bombing Libya for the past 10 days, and what the future holds for the U.S. there.

As regular readers know, CL has been on Rubio to speak up on this crucial issue related to U.S. foreign policy. He verbally blasted an Obama State Department official on March 17 , challenging him on what (if anything) the U.S. intended to do in Libya as Muammar Gadhafi began mowing down his opposition. Meanwhile, Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry were loudly demanding action.

The de facto line we've heard from Republicans (such as McCain) prior to the speech (and echoed by presidential contender Tim Pawlenty this morning) was that the president was right to go into Libya, coupled with the rejoinder that the intervention is taking place "much too late," although as Obama himself mentioned in the speech last night, it took over a year before the U.S. and NATO went into Bosnia in the mid 1990s after similar destruction was being wrought at that time by Slobodan Milosevic.

Now the GOP line is to attack Obama for saying that regime change is not what the U.S. is attempting to do in Libya (Obama said to attempt that would mean committing ground troops and also increase the likelihood that more civilians would die).

Rudy Giuliani, who is beginning to sound worse than Newt Gingrich in reflexively bashing whatever Obama does, did so again last nig ht in his review of the speech, saying,

"The president says our mission is to protect the people of Libya," Giuliani said. "Well, how do you protect the people of Libya and not be for regime change in Libya? Isn't the danger for the people of Libya Gadhafi?"

He added, "The president of the United States did not define a clear goal. He didn't tell us what success is. He can't, because he's contradicting himself. You know what success is? Success is removing Gadhafi. He just doesn't want to say that."

This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2011.