Obama Failure Thread Part IV

I don't believe we have ever had a president who, knowing what Obama knew, would not have given that order.

Maybe Jefferson, but I don't really believe it. He wasn't too fastidious to back a pretender to the "throne" of Tripoli and then abandon him in peril when it suited us.

The isolationist/pacifist Cooledge kept US troops in Nicaragua.

And who's the most liberal candidate ever-- McGovern? Anybody really think he wouldn't have?

Heck, even the fictional Bartlett did, although he agonized about it...

 

Yes maybe, which if so illustrates U.S. exceptionalism. Many countries really do care about observing international law.

At any rate, I still think it takes a peculiar Democrat to view Obama as too liberal. I also think that if you gave them truth serum, many Republicans would admit that the country's current tax-cutting, let business do its thing, internationally interventionalist approach, is quite similar to what they would have expected had McCain won the election.

 

This is why international law doesn't work - terrorist cells in countries are not the same as countries. Pakistan was never attacked; Osama bin Laden was. Yet, Pakistan's sovereignty was violated. Looong history of the US going after the Pancho Villas of the world. Technically, it shouldn't be allowed. But it is.

 

Thank you President Bush. Thank you Vice President Cheney. Thank you Lady Thatcher.

 

Yeah I know we're off topic, but I did wish to point out that while Americans find the notion of illegal wars and international law to be rather pointless and comical, many if not most other countries have different views. For example, there is a whole lot of heat on Tony Blair in the U.K. for having flouted international law.

So on that topic, even a lefty American President who is by American standards a globalist, is pretty far to the right.

 

Well Russians, yeah.

Wasn't that due in part to their fear of engaging in an illegal war? That is they didn't want to invade unless everybody was aboard, which of course is tricky to accomplish. My memory is fuzzy on this one.

 

No concerns. I cite this issue as an example (among many) that Obama is far from a bleeding-heart liberal. I'm fine that the U.S. took out the guy, and it's pretty clear that Pakistan couldn't have been told.

 

The irony being you've got two GOP candidates protesting this assination.

Me, I think assination is a harsh word, I perfer to think that Anwar al-Awlaki died from an airborne virus.

 

So the fifth amendment isn't important to you?

I'm not sure how you can support the fifth amendment and what happened here.

 

Trust me, you're lucky I'll never be President.

You'd be up against the wall by the end of the inauguration.

 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

 

Yeah, civil liberties are foolish. It would be cool if you went to jail for what you post on BigSoccer. Why not, right?

So how will you feel if Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry go on a killing spree?

 

1. Extremism in defense of liberty is, in fact, a vice. The reason why Emerson's quote is so meaningful is that only fools set their world view to total absolutes.

2. How would I feel if Michelle or Rick kill al-Awlaki? I'd be cool with it.

As taosjohn correctly pointed out, no President in the history of the United States would not have done this. As Cicero astutely said of Cato, he acted as if he lived in Plato's Republic rather than Romulus' sewer. You're setting yourself up as Cato. And you will lose. And no one will even write a Pharsalia for you.

 

Wow.

I guess no one defending this has a problem with warrant-less eavesdropping, huh?

 

you cannot be so foolish as not to notice the 'D' after the current occupant of the White House

that 'D' makes all the difference



http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/30/awlaki_6/

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
By Glenn Greenwald



"What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President’s ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki — including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry’s execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists: criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process."

 

Juan Cole has a good take on this. There does not seem to be a valid constitutional argument for killing this man with no due process.

http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/al-awlaqi-should-have-been-tried-in-absentia.html

 

Not unless they raise my bank fees.