The obsession over abusive executive power has mysteriously vanished.
And we were worried about waterboarding?
Now that the Obama administration has upped the ante in the war on terror, the Bush-era policies of detention and so-called “torture” look downright tame by comparison. Anwar al-Awlaki, after all, wasn’t a foreign national apprehended on the field of battle, sent to Guantanamo as an unlawful enemy combatant and roughed up a bit.
No, the radical cleric was, not to put too fine a point on it, assassinated by executive authority, the power of which to target an American citizen is apparently unreviewable by the courts. Can you imagine the howls of outrage had this occurred during the Bush administration?
Yet, the only protests we’ve seen from the left in the past two weeks were against Wall Street.
What he said. In spades.
At some point, the “war” on terrorism has to end and we have to leave it to our court system, or we’ll be in a perpetual war.
And if there was so much outrage over torture, why are we so silent on actual killing. Is it ok to kill, but not to treat poorly? That strikes me as somewhat contradictory, as it should any thinking person.
The GOP is relatively quiet on the issue at hand here because they want that same power when they get office back and don’t want to appear hypocritical. The Dems aren’t piping up because they’re more worried about hurting the President’s reputation than they are about doing the right thing.
And who’s left?
Americans like me who see both sides and think both of them are full of crap and cowardly and there are very few places for people like me to go.