Fascinatingly Tortured Attempt…

…by a Lefty attempting to come to grips with the fact that Obama has anointed himself a completely unaccountable tyrant with a 007 on anybody he feels like killing.  This, in particular, I find amazing:

You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral meets what is necessary.

You love two things, your family and the law, and you have surrounded yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that you obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don’t fall prey to the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on record for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying to prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize both discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess a personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own; and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created the Lethal Presidency.

The author, one of America’s Enlightened Progressive People, somebody who so clearly considers himself just so much better than the unwashed slobs who don’t see the greatness and goodness of his set, then goes on to furrow the brow in utter bewilderment at how this reflection of his own greatness and goodness could, well, act like a tyrant and declare himself a law unto himself. It never occurs to the author to consider the possibility that a culture as marinated in pride and self-regard as his and Obama’s might actually be a hatchery for tyranny and lawlessness. It certainly never occurs to him that Obama is part of the same arrogant ruling class as the previous Administration. There is a sort strange naivete in his arrogance. He writes the whole piece, climaxing in Obama’s murder of a sixteen year old kid for the crime of being in the wrong place (a murder the Administration defines out of existence by declaring everybody we kill as an “enemy combatant”) and even records Obama turning the murder of teenagers into a joke:

You have spoken once about the drones and teenaged boys. You weren’t speaking as the Lethal President but you were referring to the Lethal Presidency. You were also making a joke. You were at the podium at the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You welcomed the Jonas Brothers and said, “Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you — Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”

By the end of the piece, the author appears to be feeling his way to the dim realization that original sin might even touch, if not him, then at least his idol:

What if the next Lethal President is not as good and as honorable as you? What if he is actually cruel or bloodthirsty?

What if he turns out to be — like you, Mr. President — just a man?

No doubt this guy imagines that in supporting Obama he is choosing the “lesser of two evils”.  What he, like we, are actually getting is evil.  And he rationalizes it as we do with excuses and evasions about his heros good ends and fetching qualities make him an honorable man (read: “one of my tribe, and so self-evidently decent and well-intentioned”).  It reminds me of nothing os much as the labors to make excuses for when Our Guy pays money to have his own grandchild slain should it turn out to be defective.

Good and decent men do not do such things.  Deeply corrupt men do.  And we should stop cutting both these men any slack.  But we should, in particular, not cut the President slack since he actually works for us while Romney is merely applying for the job.  Supine articles like this, treating a murdering tyrant wth kid gloves because he is regarded by the author as a member of the In Crowd go far to to bear out Dale Price’s  wry remark that a major advantage of Romney winning would be the that press begins to do its job again instead of tremble in spaniel-like devotion before its master.