My biggest problem with this dude’s argument is that he is essentially asking for permission to express his political opinions without fear of contradiction or mockery from other people on the left. We could empty out his argument so it had no specific content. Let’s say that he believes x and he says x. And then let’s say that TBogg writes a snarky post mocking x. Finally, let’s say this dude writes a long heartfelt post about how terrible it is that he can never say x without people like TBogg making him feel like a child who loves ponies and woodland creatures.
Honestly, I could stop now, because that, at bottom, is all his post is.
Of course, his post is about the American government killing innocent civilians. I don’t know any liberals who are in favor of killing innocent civilians. Even among conservatives, at most, you’ll find people who are indifferent. No one but a few sociopaths is actually advocating killing innocent civilians. So, the following is really just a stronger version of what nearly everyone feels:
I don’t know how else it say it, considering I’ve said it a thousand times. I want my country to stop killing innocent people. I want it so bad I don’t know how to act or what to do. I want it so bad I can’t sit still or sleep at night. I want it with everything I have that’s capable of want. And I know that this is the kind of talk that invites pure contempt from those like Tbogg, who have only the idiom of sarcasm and derision and cannot imagine straightforward moral sentiment.
So, why am I not staying up at night worrying about innocent civilians? Maybe it is because no innocent civilians have been killed by drones this year. About nine civilians were killed by drones last year. In the entire history of the drone program there are 191 confirmed cases of civilians being killed and at least 139 of them were killed during the Bush administration. Yet, to hear this dude talk, you’d think that we are just going around indiscriminately bombing villages of innocent people. I am a lot more concerned about what our troops are doing in Afghanistan than I am with the drone program, precisely because the drone program generally does not kill innocent civilians. Its entire purpose is to avoid “collateral damage.”
If drones are a concern, and they are, loss of innocent life is near the bottom of the list. Issues of national sovereignty, world opinion/blowback, and the rule of law and proper oversight are much better elements to discuss than some fictitious Holocaust of innocent people. In fact, focusing on drones takes the conversation away from the broader U.S. foreign policies that create the targets of drone attacks. Obama’s foreign policy isn’t doing enough to tamp down the anti-American sentiment that fuels terrorism. Drones are, in this sense, potentially counterproductive. One might oppose them because they make us less safe rather than because they tend to take innocent lives.
In any case, pro-Obama progressives don’t attack people when they say “I’m not voting for Obama because of the drones” because we think the drone program is great. We attack them because that’s a stupid argument. If you said that you aren’t voting for him because he is aggressively tracking down terrorists and you don’t support doing that, then that would make more sense. If your morals require you to keep your hands clean, that’s fine. My morals tell me I have to oppose the modern Republican Party with every fiber in my body. So, we just have a different moral outlook.
I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone. But if you try to act like you are morally superior to me, I will mock you.
Poor Fred’s sleep deficit must be atrocious if the death of innocent civilians keeps him up at night. His main topic is how fucking moral he is compared to people who do something other than stay up all night wringing their hands.
And he’s been on the same kick for years.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/5345043262/freddy-de-boers-easy-moral-dudgeon
In my experience, people who pose in the “leftier-than-thou” attitude are usually trying to work out their own inner psychological/emotional issues in the public political sphere.
It’s toxic, infantile, and dumb, but not sure how it’s anything new.
My personal litmus test for these guys is two fold:
If none of the above, how can you call yourself a liberal?
Perfect response. Wish I’d had this when I was more ineffectively and ineloquently arguing the same point with my, sadly, former friend. (Who defriended me on Facebook so fast I couldn’t even read back my reply to her.)
So, so tempted to send this to her anyway, but hell, she’s probably blocked me.
People on Balloon Juice have been trying to figure out if this is the same Freddie deBoer who sometimes posts on their front page. His general ideology seems similar, but I can’t confirm it. Does anybody know?
Of course it’s the same one.
Why did anyone need to think about it to figure it out? It’s the same guy. I notice a lot of posters here think drones are no big deal. I’m sure you’d think the same way if Russia or China were flying drones over your neighborhood. And trying to moralize it by saying that PPACA saves lives? Ugh!!!!!
The real hypothetical here would be some American group is plotting to kill Russian civilians in large numbers, the American government can’t track them down and arrest them for some reason, and Russia chooses to fly drones over us instead of invading and occupying us.
Sucks for sure. But understandable.
Also, nice straw man there. Nobody here thinks “drones are no big deal.”
I notice a lot of posters here think drones are no big deal. I’m sure you’d think the same way if Russia or China were flying drones over your neighborhood.
In this theoretical, are there people in my neighborhood trying to slaughter every man, woman, and child on an airliner, after having successfully carried out such attacks for a couple of decades?
I wouldn’t like the U.S. Army to mount an assault on my neighborhood comparable to what they did in St. Lo, either. Your point?
And trying to moralize it by saying that PPACA saves lives?
The drone program itself saves lives, but some of them American, so you don’t care.
One of the things bugs me most about the way guys like DeBoer attack Obama from the left on foreign policy is that there’s this core assumption that what Obama is doing is somehow unprecedented. I think that’s why there’s so much focus on the drones: at least they’re new in a technological sense. When you get past the “killer robots” angle, though, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of this is, in fact, depressingly precedented, and that those precedents stretch back in time to long before anybody had heard of George W. Bush, let alone Barack Obama.
I think drones are far preferable to the use of cluster bombs–which is what we did a lot of at the beginning of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And why would launching missiles from ships off the coast be preferable–or dropping huge bombs? They are responsible for far more civilian deaths.
The problem isn’t Obama. It isn’t even his choice. NatSec decisions haven’t been made in the White House for half a century.
I think we all know what he really needs. That and a magical unicorn.
Mockery!
I don’t necessarily want to mock the guy, but I do think that when he says he wants it so bad he doesn’t know how to act or what to do, he unwittingly hits the nail on the head. I don’t really care how much he wants it, but if he had any ideas about how to actually end the drone strikes I’d be willing to listen. Complaining about TBogg certainly isn’t going to save any lives.
About nine civilians were killed by drones last year. In the entire history of the drone program there are 191 confirmed cases of civilians being killed and at least 139 of them were killed during the Bush administration.
Let’s be careful here … these numbers come from people who count anyone who is killed as a terrorist UNLESS there is clear proof otherwise. I didn’t believe numbers from the “Defense” industry during the Bush administration and don’t believe them now. The Pentagon alone employs over 29k people in public relations – this is the biggest propoganda organization in the history of the world.
However, I think we can agree that this is exactly the wrong time to bring up this criticism of Obama. We can all agree that Romney would be at least marginally worse in this regard and phenomenally worse on a whole barrel of other issues. Bringing this up right now is not a moral argument based on outcomes – it is a moral argument based on wanting to feel good about yourself.
You’re right about it being silly to believe the DoD on civilian casualties. Someone needs to remember I.F. Stone’s 1st Commandment.
The source isn’t military and you have their methodology wrong.
I don’t want to dwell on this but:
1) They don’t count civilians as civilians unless this is clearly proven in multiple news reports. Granted I overstated when I said they called them terrorists – they may be put into a general “people” category. But there is no doubt that the civilian number is understated.
2) I didn’t say Pentagon, I said “Defense” industry. Who funds these guys? It’s hard to nail down from their website but I do consider this well-funded think tank part of the massive “defense” industry.
I think their biggest donor is Eric E. Schmidt from Google. My brother is actually a fellow there.
Their methodology looks reasonable in many respects, suggesting an effort to not inflate the proportion of militants killed. But they leave a major question unanswered: Are they relying solely on first-hand, independent accounts from reporting on the ground that appears in outlets like the AP, CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, etc, or are they including government statements that appear in these sources?
The second thing to keep in mind is that because drones have targeted would-be rescuers and even journalists, it’s increasingly difficult to get non-government sources of information about those killed.
we had a somewhat similar issue with the use of Shannon airport as a staging post/refueling centre not just for US troops en route to/from Iraq, but for extraordinary rendition flights of (sometimes entirely innocent) suspects for torture under the extraordinary rendition programme.
Irish public opinion was c. 70%+ against the war, and probably c. 95%+ against the extraordinary rendition programme although I don’t recall an opinion poll on the subject. Irish foreign policy has always been very pro-human rights and critical of US policy in Iraq and elsewhere, and the US’s attempt to exempt its own citizen’s from prosecution for all human right’s violations.
So what do you do when one of your biggest allies (economic and social) flat out lies to you about its rendition programme using Shannon? One left activist managed to breach security and damage a US plane (and more or less got away with it in the courts). But should we put our entire relationship with the US at risk for the sake of a moral principle?
The Irish government more or less ignored the issue and hoped it would just go away. That is partly why the election of Obama was greeted with such enormous relief and enthusiasm both public and private. There is a general sense that even though his foreign policy isn’t all that different from Bush’s, at least he isn’t being gratuitously offensive or starting any new wars (yet!), and the rendition programme (as far as we know) has ended.
There is also a general recognition that war is what it is and civilians will get hurt even when every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties. For the moment at least, the Obama administration gets a dispensation under this understanding. Guantánamo is still an irritant as is the US exceptionlism which grants its leaders a free pass from human rights violations and war crimes, but what can you do against the world’s only superpower to change that situation?
If we accept the idea that, in an effort to end the war in Afghanistan, it is a reasonable goal to try to take out these leadership targets, we have two ways to go about it; we either send in massive amounts of troops to try to root them out, which will alert them to our presence, making them even more difficult to find; or we use drones to surveil them and try to remove them with as little collateral damage as possible when, and where, they least expect it.
These military leaders are extremely mobile, they travel in small, difficult-to-detect groups and they are not at all reluctant to use innocents as shields. Massive amounts of troops will cause far more collateral damage, inflame local resentment even further, and cost not only more Afghan and Pakistani lives, but more American lives as well.
At least with the drones, we can watch these enemy leaders and wait until they are more isolated and attempt to strike them when fewer ‘innocent’ people will be harmed. That said, we must recognize that many of these enemy leaders are patriarchs of familial clans, who support them fully. This makes these strikes especially difficult, because many of the people who ‘appear’, or are ‘reported’ to be innocents, may not be.
So, why am I not staying up at night worrying about innocent civilians? Maybe it is because no innocent civilians have been killed by drones this year. About nine civilians were killed by drones last year.
Do you really believe this? You’re smarter than that Boo!!
Boo, if US drone strikes don’t keep you up all night, that’s fine. Even if you found them morally reprehensible, it would be a counterproductive reaction (which is my problem with this dude’s argument).
But your statement that no civilians have been killed this year is on such shaky ground that you’re in danger of disseminating government propaganda.
First, remember that among the measures that Obama implemented to reduce civilian deaths was a redefinition of “militant”:
Second, the New America Foundation page that you link to is titled “An Analysis of U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan, 2004-2012”. You’re basing your argument on a subset of data, and maybe not even the majority of it, since strikes in Yemen and other countries exceed strikes in Pakistan.
(BTW, to get a more accurate sense of the impact of drone strikes on anti-American sentiment, you’d need to multiply the first bar by a factor of four, since it’s averaging four years of killings. That adds about 300 civilian deaths to the numbers for those years).
Third, I see the non-partisan, illustrious board membership of this Foundation, but the construction of these graphs is shoddy. There’s no mention of the redefinition of “militant” and “civilian” during this time period; that would be mandatory in a reputable publication.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=3&_
r=2
And just a side note: there are people in American politics who encourage civilian deaths. It’s the unspoken corollary of any argument that’s based on the principle of collective punishment. It’s also the result of the type of sanctions that we put on Iraq under Saddam Hussein and that we’re pushing for Iran.
Yes, I missed that I needed to include a second source for Yemen. That doesn’t really change my point, however. Although it’s probably untrue that zero civilians have been killed in Yemen this year.
It looks like low-end estimates are 22 innocent civilians since inception of program to high-end at 63, with high numbers possible. Still, there have been no civilians reported dead in drone strikes this year in Pakistan, and nothing has been confirmed from Yemen.
Thanks for the data, and for linking to the Foundation’s website. It looks like an interesting project the more I read the website.
One thing that’s unclear to me is why so many of the strikes in the last three years have unknown targets. Wouldn’t we know what group a combatant belongs to before we target his killing?
Another complicating factor is the issue of drone strikes vs air strikes. How we use this data to support conclusions is just as important as its reliability.
But it’s good to know that this is out there.
In many cases, acknowledging the identity of the target could easily (or concievably) allow the deduction of who or where or how the intelligence pinpointing the target was gotten.
I have no doubt that all strikes are against specific human targets. Now whether or not that target is actually there … that’s a different matter. But you just DON’T send a milliondollar drone without thinking you know who’s going to get it in the neck.
I’m sorry, Booman. New America has no credibility. Just look at their funders. Specifically, under the $250,000-$999,999 category.
you might as well just tell me that my brother has no credibility.
Or, even me, since I once came pretty close to landing a job at NAF, too.
Ok. Boo — You have no credibility.
Now, where do I get my popcorn flavoured ice cream?
Pathetic response.
Really? Someone accuses the New America Foundation of having no credibility based on nothing but a selective look at their donor list, and I don’t have the right to take it as a personal attack on my brother who works there? Obviously, nothing he writes has any credibility since he’s tainted by his relationship with NAF. And since I could easily have been working as their New Media guy for the last three years, it means I don’t have any credibility either.
You want to take a shot at their coverage of the drone wars, then look at their reporting, their methodology, and what their critics might have said about their work. But don’t just assert that the reporting has no credibility based on nothing but the laziest of analyses.
Sssh — money from Blackrock and the Peter G Peterson Fund only does evil when it is sent to “conservative” “think tanks” to advance the fortunes of corporations. Sent to “liberal” “think tanks” is does good and has no influence on what those “think tank” researchers find and report. And the US Department of State is a similarly disinterested contributor.
They could put this comment in the section of the logic textbook where they define the fallacies.
Calvin doesn’t offer any alternative number. He doesn’t offer any alternative source. He doesn’t offer any critique of why the NAF’s methodology is wrong.
He just does what the global warming deniers do when faced with inconvenient numbers.
If people want the drone strikes to end they need to force an end to the wars. Drones are now an integral part of how we kill/assasinate/eliminate high value targets and people seem broadly indifferent to the role of drones because it poses less risk to American lives.
I seem to recall that a few of Obama’s close advisers advocated for dropping a bomb on Bin Laden’s safehouse as opposed to sending in a strike team. The bomb strike would have killed women and children. I wonder how that would have gone over.
I oppose drone usage not for fear of the loss of innocent life but because we’re underestimating the impact of terrorizing the local population and hardening anti-American sentiment which could lead to better recruitment for terrorist/insurgent groups.
It would be nice if Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes had this info as they’ve spent months implying Obama is a monster who kills innocents left and right with drones.
There are two arguments here.
IMO, the answer to the first question is that since liberal part(ies) and left parties seek some of same voters, there does tend to be heightened conflict around election times. Especially because third parties are notoriously poor at doing any thing at all between elections–not that the Democrats have been stellar in the past four years. The current third party strategy almost universally is to try to get a sufficient percentage in enough states to qualify as a recognized party in those states. Libertarians have gradually accomplished this. Greens, Socialists, and other left parties not so much. There is a great deal of frustration among third-party activists about this that ups the emotional ante in their arguments about seemingly insignificant things.
And the “I don’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils” complaint tries to claim a moral advantage where there is none. Making a moral decision about an election is much more complicated than most of these folks pretend. And the sense of being personally viscerally offended by who Obama is compared to who they thought he was overwhelms their moral arguments.
The answer to the second question IMO is Yes. The Obama administration has fundamentally changed the nature of global warfare in ways similar to the way Truman’s decision to use the bomb and pursue a nuclear monopoly did. Both of these were framed expediently without reference to the larger consequences, but the use of drones by lowering the cost of warfare for non-state actors is by far more dangerous.
The second consequence, like in the Truman administration, is the further concentration of formally un-checked power in the hands of the President. More than ever, we must trust the President to be both prudent and sensitive to Constitutional issues lest we become a system that ignores law and then the Constitution.
The Obama administration does not seem to appreciate that we are now in uncharted waters on the Constitutional authority for the sorts of attacks that drone strikes represent. And that is true even if we succeed in getting Congress to undo the damage it did with the authorizations to use force in response to the “global war on terror”. Democracy cannot survive a system that claims “If the President did it, it’s legal”.
War takes innocent lives. Period. If you don’t want innocent people killed in warfare, don’t go to war.
There is a left critique of American foreign policy that sees it as too eager to use the military first and try to use politics later. That is at least a half-truth. It is a criticism of liberal hawks of the like of Scoop Jackson (for you older folks). It is a criticism of an unrealistic Realist foreign policy.
But the the failure of the Wall Street media to accurately cover news has led to a bizarre variety of sources that feed the data set of lefties who eschew any of the major corporate media. Al Jazeera, of course. Guardian. Russia Today. PressTV. Asia Times, Dawn. A lot of the impressions about drone strikes in Pakistan have come from Dawn.
Given the secrecy in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the political conflicts for control over those areas, it is highly likely to there is not valid source of information about the consequences of a drone strike. And US intelligence likely is deluding itself if it thinks it is getting accurate information from its contacts in Pakistan.
The methodological contortions to define who a civilian is shows that asymmetric warfare is in part a strategy of using human shields. And any suggestion that any male, age 18-65 is a “militant”, as some reports try to do, is wildly inflating the support that groups can get from the people. The use of a metadata approach to this problem, parsing “militant”, “Tribesman”, “civilian”, or whatever does not make the data any more (or less) valid. The issue is the underlying reports. And that is very contested, as authors of a report from Stanford and NYU Law schools about drone attacks have found out.
Finally, a very thoughtful comment on this exceedingly depressing thread.
Except for this seems unduly harsh — considering the cultural/religious/sociological/economic make-up of the US electorate, pro-peace, fairness, equity, equality under the law is a difficult sale and made even more difficult by the proudly and smugly morally bankrupt liberals:
Came across this:
Alice K. Ross: Obama set precedent with Drone Killings for Romney to become Terminator-in-Chief
And this:
Noah Schachtman: Not Even the White House Knows the Drones’ Body Count
Typical bullying behavior of the the firebagger set. He spends all of his time denouncing other Democrats – it’s the central argument of his piece, about how terrible the Democratic administration is and the majority of Democrats are, and about his experiences denouncing other Democrats – but if anyone disagrees with his position, “It’s time for liberals to start attacking people on the left.”
Pal, attacking people on the left is all you ever do.
Just to put this into perspective: about 2700 innocent civilians were killed by al Qaeda on 9/11 (this is counting the Pentagon deaths as non-civilian). About 200 were killed in the Bali bombing. More than that in the embassy bombings. Anwar Awlaki put a kid on a plane with a bomb intended to kill every single one of the 200+ innocent civilians who flew with him that day. Left alone, they will do that again and again and again.
But because of the drone program, they have been rendered all-but-incapable of organizing such attacks. Many thousands of innocent civilians owe their lives to the degradation of al Qaeda’s ability to murder people, brought to you by the drone program.
But the moral imperative here is that we do absolutely nothing to stop attacks like that from happening, if any innocent civilians are killed at all.
This isn’t a position of humanitarian concern for civilians; it’s a willingness to sacrifice them out of a perverted idea that it only matters when civilians are killed by Americans.
When is the Global War on Terror over? Must we lose all of our domestic freedoms and wage war in every country on earth just to feel “safe”?
The US has missed the thread here. War is politics by other means. The US since 1941 has focused on war and not on the politics behind what is going on. We have become a technological giant clomping around the world with no sense of how to pro-actively deal with threats politically. And when we were seen as the “world’s remaining superpower”, we went off the deep end.
This is a prescription for continuous never-ending warfare and high military expenditures. The US taxpayer cannot sustain that sort of blindness.
What happens when non-state actors or corporations get hold of drone technology? How are we going to deal with the instability that we create in the countries where our drone attacks are occurring?
Is there really any conclusive evidence that we have saved thousands of live through the trillions of dollars that we have spent after 9/11 on defense and homeland security? That grandmas giving up all of those bottles of lotion in the TSA line has made us safer? That all of the diverting of civilian phone calls through the NSA has made us safer?
When do we get our freedoms restored?
When do we get our freedoms restored?
Right after our manufacturing jobs return from their overseas stint, replete with union wages and protections.
In other words, you can’t go home again. We’re going to have to go all the way through the looking-glass, but we’ll never be allowed to return to the world it reflects.
The debate over the use of drones is an important one to have. So is whether we want to start another war – this time with Iran – because Israel feels threatened and says if we don’t act RIGHT NOW, uh something bad might happen sometime (but they insist they don’t want to influence American elections in any way.) And maybe it would be good to speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan? These things really do deserve our attention – AFTER the election, when it’s safer for politicians to talk honestly about this stuff.
What gets me is that within 6 weeks of an election that will affect a MUCH bigger batch of issues (like our stance toward war and peace generally as well as whether we intend to care at all for the health, welfare and civil rights of our own people,) we get sidetracked by the conveniently timed tantrums of a few who apparently just noticed that dropping bombs on people is bad and that the US is a big bad bully. And what about these rumors about how Obama’s going to sell us out with some Grand Compromise with those dastardly Republicans? There’s no real evidence there, just lots of speculation and hand-wringing, breeding mistrust and resentment.
The two parties with any chance whatsoever of winning anything are fighting for control and have polar opposite views on these issues… and what does our side do? Without fail, a few holier-than-thou children among us start whining about how they didn’t get that new bicycle that they always wanted and they’re going on strike and creating a major distraction that could divide the coalition. They’re voting for this year’s Nader and they’re gonna get all their Facebook friends to unfriend anyone who won’t throw a pity party for them. “Take THAT, fake Liberals!”
So now, instead of focusing on the task at hand – demoralizing the OTHER SIDE and winning an election, the adults have to find a way to pacify the whinging, bed-wetting tots on our side. Should we take any of this seriously right now? I say NO. We should not debate their divisive issues right now – before an election. We should set up the kiddie table in the corner and let them eat over there until they’re ready to behave like big kids.
Meanwhile, we have work to do. Once the election is over, it’s open season on our own party leadership. That is the time to demand a pony and pound your fists on the table if you don’t get it. But right now, a little unity would really help. If we don’t regain majorities across the board, all of these debates we need to have will become moot anyway. Nothing good will happen because we allowed outside forces to play us and turn us against each other. And we will deserve what we get.
You describe it well, except my guess is it’s by design- concern trolls and ppl who don’t want Obama to win who are throwing tantrums, and waving red flags about grand bargains not serious democrats.
Guess you missed 1995-2000. Or you’re down with NAFTA, low capital gains taxes, energy dereg, telecom dereg, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, commodity futures modernization act, etc.
The thing is: it’s not just about the Presidency. That’s probably going to happen anyway just because the other side is a joke. If we don’t all get our butts to the polls and vote for the full slate though, we could well find ourselves just as deadlocked as we have been the last two years. That’s what should be keeping us up at night.
But yeah, we really do fall for concern trolls, don’t we? Sometimes I wonder if there’s money changing hands somewhere to get influential liberals to propagate this stuff. Or do they just want the rights to say “I told you so” by throwing these rumors and crap at us before an election? Maybe they just assume that we’re all super-mature like they are and we won’t get distracted and divided when we have “honest debates” about this stuff right before an election. Ha!
It only helps the other side because it really turns off our young idealistic new voters toward politics in general.
Agree, the down ticket races are crucial. I think there is money changing hands in some instances, some are just me-me-me and not team players, a variety of things. We’ve got a pretty serious group here in our commentariat though. And Man Eegee reported good news about the Arizona senate race
hope I’m linking to his comment
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2012/9/29/155716/716/63#63
I never understand the contempt that many Democrats have for liberals who don’t vote for the Democratic candidate. It’s one thing to say that third party votes are unreasoned, but there’s often the suggestion that the Democratic candidate is entitled to their vote regardless of any other factor. I think this approach is fundamentally anti-democratic.
The person who has the greatest opportunity to help Democrats regain majorities in the Senate and House is Obama, and I never hear him held to account on that score with the same passion as the above comment has for the rank and file. Is he and the DNC doing all they can do to support our candidates down the ballot? Is he lending his considerable stature, popularity, oratory skills, and fundraising ability to arguing what’s at stake in Congress as much as he could be doing? Where was he in 2010? Are we really going to attack people for their personal voting behavior?
You know that it’s a two-way street. Most of this strife takes place on internet blogs where the comments sections turn into feeding troughs for the trolls on both sides.
There’s equal contempt for Obots or whatever and Naderites or Firebaggers. I can’t keep track of all the different derisive terms.
Where was he in 2010? I agree that Obama hasn’t always spent his political capital wisely but he did about all that he could. The failure to promote and defend Obamacare was as much a party failure as Obama’s and the economy was still poor.
As for attacking people on their voting behavior.. you have to take into account that a lot of people who will vote 3rd party or not vote for Obama are as zealous in promoting their stance as the people who are pro-Obama. They seek converts and thus become competition.
“After the election” when all these important and necessary debates were to take place didn’t happen four years ago. We go from elections, to time out for the winners to organize their teams, lame duck Congress sorting through all the shit they haven’t acted on for two years, to winter holiday time-out, to the Congress members jockeying for offices and committee, to the inauguration, snowstorms, and finally to the season of governing. But then we’re told to STFU and give them a chance or that we don’t have the stomachs for viewing the making of sausage. Followed by summer recess and vacations. Then it’s back to the beginning of a new election cycle, and lord knows that’s the time to STFU and fall in line.
It’s a pretty standard way to make propaganda against a war or a power fighting it, faux moral agony – or fury – about the means.
Atrocity stories and accusations of war crimes never go away.
Sometimes it seems the sole purpose of international agreements on the laws of war – a farago of hypocritical craziness, on the whole – is to provide grist for that mill.
Anyway, glad to see not everyone is falling for it.
But once we stop harping about a particular method of war there remains the question whether we ought to be fighting it, at all.
A commitment to keep fighting until the last Muslim fighter associated with al-Qaeda or any of their affiliates is dead is a commitment to war without any foreseeable end.
Remember what McCain said, in answer to the question how long this might go on?
He shrugged and said something like, “I don’t know. Fifty years? Maybe a century?”
Not that I wouldn’t have voted for Obama, anyway, but that casual reply from the guy the press thought of as a sane and sensible, moderate Republican – Tweety even said he deserved to be president – chilled me to the bone.
Does all this violence and destruction really buy anybody, anywhere, an iota of safety from attacks by Muslim terrorists?
Or does it just contribute to the general instability that breeds them and gives Islamists their opportunities?
Given the vast expense in life and treasure, don’t we have to have a lot of confidence our continuing “global war on terror” is doing some good to move ahead with all this?
And I have no such confidence, at all.