Deconstructionist, post-modernist, relativists once more are muddled in a semiotic swamp of their own indiscipline. The news is that the American President pursues and destroys enemies of America, and so now they are stuck, now that this president is their boy with coming up with more euphemisms and justifications for such. Instead, they have the starkly frank 'Obama's Kill List' and the implications of all the meetings and decisions that went into such a thing.
This is like a previously 'perfect' and catty teenager discovering her own zits, and it has about that level of emotional impact on me. I guess I've lived long enough.
My input on the matter is simple. According to the New Yorker, the President has been intimately involved in giving the go orders from the Oval Office. This can only mean that he is micromanaging the military - having usurped their public credibility - doing the exact same thing with assuredly worse competence but with presumably superior political cover. I would not go as far as to say 'accountability' because accountability requires transparency, and transparency can only be established at the President's level when he hasn't scorched the earth of his predecessor.
A wise Obama, the sort we don't have, would have merely declared such targets of his 'kill list' as 'enemy combattants', a term we in the American public know as well as we do 'WMD'. He could have then said that the Army was doing America's business as usual, standing on the shoulders of GWBush. Of course the suckers who voted him into office would never accept that, but he would have the benefit of actually telling the truth. Instead, he must continue to pretend to be the European Social Democrat, drive on the left hand side of the road and call a hood a 'bonnet' and all sorts of other un-American things. Only that way can he please a constituency steeped in doublespeak. Speaking of which...
The method we have built, over a couple of hundred years, for sorting out questions of guilt and innocence and probable cause, is due process. And that may be the most degraded phrase of all.
No grownup could possibly make this kind of assertion about military action if Obama didn't give such poison rhetoric the sort of cover he has. But the President has backed himself into the corner of putting an actual war using our own actual soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and special forces on his own political shoulders while sustaining the foolish and incorrect context of criminal prosecution.
That's the massive ego of a man responsible only to those fools who elected him. Unfortunately, that's not America. I wonder if Romney can do any better.
Reagan was a coward with his plausible deniability. Obama is a snake with his obfuscations and duplicity. GWBush called out our enemies to the world and reminded us every day what his intentions were. There was never any question that we are at war. But we clearly have a man in Washington who will use weasel words to suggest that we are not.
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