Daily Reminder: Obama May Be the Lesser of Two Evils, But He Is Still Evil
Perhaps because it is election season, Democrats have all but given up on saying that war is wrong or bad or a waste of blood and treasure, and are now saying things like, "Obama's drone strikes may be awful, but he is still better than Bush, and probably Romney, even though Romney has not yet had the chance to murder a teenager from several thousand miles away."
Wonkette recently published this appraisal of Obama's secret drone war, based on the NYT's secret kill list story:
Are you a pacifist? Then there is no way to sugar-coat the fact that your tax dollars continue, under President Obama, to be used to kill people with missiles in foreign countries. Sorry! But if you think that sometimes you need to perpetrate violence for the greater good—even in a politicized Obama only when necessary kind of way—then you'll probably be satisfied, queasy-satisfied, or talk-yourself-into-it-satisfied, at the general description of how the Secret 'Kill List' is compiled, with Obama signing off on the drone strikes done by the military and most of the strikes done by the CIA (which is in charge of the Pakistani strikes for the usual byzantine reasons). Everyone tries really hard to make sure that only double-confirmed terrorists who are actually working on killing USA Americans and who aren't hanging with civilians are vaporized by flying death robots.
And even when the wrong people are killed (AND OF COURSE THE WRONG PEOPLE GET KILLED SOMETIMES), less of them get killed than were killed constantly in the wars Obama ended/is ending, OK? Because if there's one thing that kills more people than flying death robots firing missiles at camps and villages a couple times a week, it's full-on wars with armies and soldiers invading your country for years and years.
And then there's this:
And even if you're all like, "Whatever, I trust Eric Holder to do the right thing in this situation," someday Eric Holder is going to quit and go back to his first love (the New Black Panthers). Here is a very true statement from that article: "This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that's not sustainable. I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret OLC memos, and it ain't a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a DOJ safe."
Guess who said that! Go on, guess! Give up? It is Michael Hayden, Bush's last CIA director! Ha ha, guess he feels kind of mad about what the Dumb-o-crats are doing with all the precious terrorist-killing powers he and his buddies so carefully put together between 2001 and 2008. Just like you'll be pissed when Romney uses all of Obama's totally legit flying deathbot policies for evil, rather than good. Don't worry about that Secret Kill List, though, Romney doesn't believe in government bureaucrats compiling Secret Kill Lists. That can be done more efficiently by the private sector.
To recap: Obama is better at murdering people than Bush; Romney would somehow be worse at it.
Leaving aside the questions raised by that assertion—how, exactly, could someone be worse than Obama, seeing as he's continued most of Bush's policies, including torture, which we simply do in foreign countries, rather than in the slice of Cuba we refuse to relinquish—what's really great about Wonkette's post is that Obama feels exactly the same way.
"You never know who is going to be president four years from now," Mr Obama is said to have told aides during a discussion about whether he should be able to detain terror suspects indefinitely. "I have to think about how Mitt Romney would use that power."
That quote is from a new book coming out this week titled Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, written by Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman. The Daily Beast adds some context:
In a 2009 meeting with advisers, Obama voiced concerns about what a future president may do with the power to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists. Alluding to the FDR-era Supreme Court decision that allowed the president to intern American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, Obama worried about the powers his actions may place in the hands of a future president.
So Obama once worried that one of his awful policies would allow him, and every president going forward, to indefinitely detain people. And then he went and made it a reality by signing the National Defense Authorization Act.
Obama has set the bar for government evil so high, it's hard to imagine how Romney could possibly get his geriatric ass over it. If he does make it over, it'll undoubtedly be with a boost from Obama's codification of some seriously heinous policies.