krebscycle

What I am saying is that Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone.

I hate when that happens – a politician goes beyond the Moral Comfort Zone of a Morally Serious Thinker like Mr. Friedersdorf. Mostly outraged by Mr. Obama’s foreign policy and  embrace of what Mr. Friedersdorf calls post-9/11 authoritarianism, he is forced to vote on pure principle as he explains:

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won’t win. I am supporting him because he ought to.

Gary Johnson: against the Civil Rights Acts, dubious about legal prohibition of  child labor, when in office was a run-of-the-mill right wing Republican, and – to top it off – is not sure if he is against the drone war. On the other hand, from a high minded moral point of view, he is both white and a conservative.  And he’s pro-pot. And now that we know what kind of moral line in the sand Mr. Friedersdorf is drawing, let’s look back at his indictment of the President.

Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed.

This is a series of lies. The first lie is to pretend that being a member of a hostile military force that is at war with the United States does not make one a legitimate target under International Law and US Law. There has never been any serious question about this. Citizenship status is not now and has never been any protection. People like right wing religious nutball and terror advocate Al-Alwaqi who openly announced themselves to be at war with the US and enlisted in a foreign military force against which Congress had authorized the use of force are hostile soldiers. The 5th Amendment, which none of our “Civil Liberties” Zealots appear to have read does not mention citizenship and was never intended to govern the actions of the military against hostile forces.  When President Lincoln ordered the Grand Army of the Republic into battle he was ordering the deaths of large numbers of American citizens fighting in Confederate Armies.  Unlike Mr. Al-Alwaqi, many of those people were involuntary participants – drafted into military service. To call war “extra-judicial” is absurd.

The second lie  is to whitewash George Bush: “Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did”.  What George Bush claimed was the unrestricted right to designate anyone as an “enemy combatant” and then to be able to treat that person, in custody, as neither a citizen protected by the Constitution or a prisoner of war protected by Geneva Conventions. Bush also claimed to not be bound by the Torture Convention and Bush created a test ground for a police state in New Orleans. To compare these actions and claims to Obama’s totally Constitutional pursuit of military targets is not just wrong, it is gross propaganda.

It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed.

Nope. Not even close.