Catholic and Enjoying It!
…something is terribly, terribly wrong.
Hanson thinks its really cool that the President has voted himself the power to murder American citizens without arrest, evidence, trial, judge, jury, verdict or sentence. He loves that our God King can just skip over that and order the death of 16 year old boys for the crime of having dinner in the wrong place.
And note the logic of how he got there:
Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?
Predators both depersonalize and personalize war in a fashion quite unknown in the past. In one sense, killing a terrorist is akin to playing an amoral video game thousands of miles away. But in another, we often know the name and even recognize the face of each victim, in a way unknown in the anonymous carnage of, for example, the Battles of Verdun and Hue. Does that make war more or less humane?
Once the most prominent critic of the war on terror, Obama has now become its greatest adherent — and in the process is turning the tide against al-Qaeda. And so far, the American people of all political stripes — for vastly different reasons — seem more relieved than worried over Obama’s most unexpected incarnation as Predator-in-Chief.
Torture is a dead issue for Hanson because a) his tribe has embraced it completely as a defining feature of the Thing that Used to be Conservatism and b) this Administration backed off on Bush torture policies while refusing to bring to book the people who ordered the torture. So it will be right back once the GOP regains power, not because it keeps us safe, but because the brain dead consequentialism of the Right has gained momentum on this commitment and can’t back down, no matter how stupid and immoral this commitment is. But that does not make it a dead issue. It makes it a very much live issue precisely because, as Hanson notes, the same consequentialist logic that animates the step toward making America a torture state also animates the step toward making it a lawless one in which the Executive has supreme arbitrary and unilateral power of life and death over every citizen he decides is a threat. Some of us think that’s a very bad thing indeed. Victor Davis Hanson and his merry band of End to Evil types think it’s kinda cool and are gloating that Obama has joined their ranks. As Lady Macbeth exults in the words of pure pagan lawless worship of power:
Feel safe or you may be an enemy of the state.
File under “Sin Makes You Stupid”.
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