that Obama assassination paper

[martasfic]

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

The internet, or at least my FB page, is buzzing over a leaked white paper written by the DO setting out the reasoning on when the president can legally order an assassination. Searching for “Obama assassination white paper” will bring up lots of opinion and news pieces on this, but here’s the one I read, if you’d like an overview.

I honestly want to be as upset about this as many of my friends evidently are. It makes me feel like a bad citizen that I wouldn’t be outraged over the killing of Americans. And I am upset, not so much over the killing-of-Americans bit as much as the killing, full stop. And to be clear up front, this is an area where Obama is absolutely horrible, not much better (if better at all) than a Republican would be. He’s basically bought into the Bush idea that we are always and everywhere at war so the normal legal protections must be suspended to save us from the terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and defend that in any way.

But at the same time, when I look at the outrage over this, it feels more than a little… convenient, I guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments

[dwimordene-2011.livejournal.com]

Honestly, stuff like this is why I don't call myself a progressive. To me, that word means "grab bag of issues, no analysis of the nature of the connection between them and no effort to figure out how to deal with underlying causes." It's a more advanced form of liberalism, to me, and as Cornel West so eloquently pointed out twenty years ago, the problem with liberals and conservatives alike is that they both assume our society is basically sound and sane. Others pointed that out long before he did, but whatever - same point.