Catholic and Enjoying It!
How does the Right respond?
FOX manages to get it wrong even when it gets it right. A piece that begins with a very perceptive first paragraph:
We no longer have to transport ourselves to a magical alternate reality to ponder what a love child between Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney would look like. Given a Justice Department memo obtained by NBC News, we can conclude that child would look like none other than President Barack Obama.
David Frost, in his conversation with President Nixon, asked him if the president could do something illegal. Nixon responded, “I’m saying that when the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Vice President Cheney, in the War on Terror, took the strong position that citizenship did not necessarily matter when it came to targeting our enemies.
Though Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama was squeamish about such things, President Obama has taken on a very Nixonian-Cheneyesque view of such things. Now, NBC News has uncovered a Justice Department memo making clear what President Obama’s evolved view on terrorists is — kill ‘em regardless of citizenship and do not worry about such small things as constitutional due process.
…still manages to conclude:
Just kill them before they kill us. At some point, we must trust that the president and his advisers, when they see a gathering of Al Qaeda from the watchful eye of a drone, are going to make the right call and use appropriate restraint and appropriate force to keep us safe.
Frankly, it should be American policy that any American collaborating with Al Qaeda is better off dead than alive. Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney should be proud.
What the idiot savant author never questions is how we know, apart from the uncorroborated word of our God King, that the people targeted for killing are “collaborating with al Quaeda”. It takes a special kind of crazy and stupid–a kind found exclusively on the Right–to recognize that Obama is a lawless tyrant trampling on the Constitution who secretly and unilaterally murders American citizens without proof of guilt (and even to denounce his contempt for the rule of law in other matters), and then to cheer for this way cool secret kill list drone murder stuff because it’s all badass and militarist and war on terror-y to slaughter 16 year olds on the Prez’s say so. FOX News chickenhawkery reaches a new plateau in stupidity with this brain-dead celebration of totalitarianism. You can wrap a turd in “war on terror” rhetoric and FOX will eat it and feed it to its viewers. Best part, the audience cheers for secret kill lists *and* goes on yelling about Obama as Hitler at the same time. Smart and not at all crazy or anything.
Oh, and look! A major neocon journal declares the Obama secret DOJ document careful and responsible. Because TERROR!
Glenn Greenwald, who gets it, sums up the immense danger of the Obama Administration policy:
This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.
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