We hear from a Obama supporter, an African-American woman -- a military veteran and mother of two -- 'I'm Exhausted Of Defending You' is this my new reality? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHv1ENYAulY
Exhausting, indeed Some of those are easier to defend; some not. The stimulus was too small; that's not all on him, but, rather, Congress. The health reform is a bit of a mess; that's not all on him, but, rather, Congress also. The financial reform is watered down; that's not all on him, but, rather, Congress also. One can question his leadership to a substantial degree in these issues, but others might legitimately question the cynical partisan approach the GOP has taken, and their willingness to exploit their own obstructionism as evidence of Obama's failure. But there are also some things that are all his. Obama has continued Bush detention policies; the failure of Democrats to help him close Gitmo is an important chapter in that, but Congress cannot be held responsible for his administration's legal briefs in detention-related lawsuits. The looming fight over the defense bill is well-timed politics intended to rally liberals to the Democrats as they move to strike DADT, but will be the first real favor the Obama administration has done for his LGBT supporters (unless we want to accuse that they threw the Massachusetts DoMA case). He has handled the war in Afghanistan poorly by any liberal measure. Strangely, the most part of the criticism he faces is for situations to which Republicans contributed greatly. Where he has failed most, however, involves criticisms swept away by the administration's antagonism toward its liberal supporters. We're still slaughtering civilians abroad. We're still plotting CIA assassinations. ("Sentence first—verdict afterward!") We're still detaining people improperly. We're still pandering to stupid extremity in the name of centrism and bipartisanship. Perhaps most exhausting, though, is the very real prospect that the alternative is even worse: bold, uncompromising leadership, but straight into the abyss. Liberals find themselves supporting a centrist far too willing to compromise with bad ideas because they feel too closely pressed by conservative extremity. That is, either back the determined centrist and his incompetent Congressional quasi-allies, or give over to insanity. Right now, real solutions to the challenges facing the nation wait in potential outside the spectrum of acceptable political discourse. Exhausting, indeed.
The buck stops with the president, and GOP obstructionism, in some cases, is popular. Meanwhile, the goal posts have continually been moved by the Dems. First it was let's get back Congress. They got that (2006). Then it was the presidency and then the senate and then the super-majority and so on and so forth. Just another little bit of power and suddenly things would get better and they would do something positive. I'll let you be the judge how that paradigm has turned out. The hard Left may care about such things, but the media has largely been silent on Obama's war -- or at least relatively so, when compared to how similar moves were covered under Bush. There is no slaughter of innocents abroad and the CIA is not assissinating anyone, unless you are interpreting the word to include drone strikes of armed militants.
don't try to say anything against obama you darky. buffalo is a racist! buffalo roam is a fucking racist! this thread totally proves it.
I feel so terrible for the people who fell for this guy. I mean what hope for change is there when you're picking between two career politicians? Sad part is Obama isn't even listening to her. Though they don't play his response, I'd bet it was just party line gibberish that drags on just long enough for a lot of people to forget that she had an actual question that he's failing to answer.
Well now, did you guys actually read the comments from some of the complaintants at the town hall meeting? First there's this: OK, fair enough, I guess...but then she goes on: BINGO! Where's my free lunch, ass munch?! You promised me "hope" and "change" and I interpreted that as meaning "handout" and "free stuff!" Where is it?! Reminiscent of ponzi schemers wanting their fair "share" of the hustle. Then there's this guy: Whuuuuut? Can't pay your interest? Um, I believe you knew there was interest on a loan going into the deal, right? Did you not read the fine print? So now President Obama has to bail people out of their own stupidity? It gets worse: If by "American Dream" you mean "dismiss all the student loan debt I incurred," let's hope, yes, the American Dream is dead for you. This, clearly, is the backlash of the whole nebulous "hope and change" platform. Since the president chose not to define "hope" and "change" during his campaign, chiselers like these took the liberty to define them for themselves. Further, Americans need to stop viewing the president (whether he's Republican or Democrat) as a superhero and the government as the Justice League and start solving their own problems.
What do you want the man to do, call up the US Treasury and have them issue her a check? It was a stupid question...actually it wasn't even a question -- it was a whine. I mean, seriously, how do you answer a question like that? Ask a rhetorical question and you get a rhetorical answer.
Why wouldn't you? Not that every killing in a war is an assassination, but the difference seems to come own to whether the target is a public figure or not. And while many of the targets are not well-known to the US public, the entire premise of going after "high-value targets" (the common description of drone strike operations) fits nicely into the assassination paradigm. If you're looking to kill leaders to demonstrate your will and means of doing so to their followers (and the rest of the polity they exist within), then how is that anything other than assassination? Why even resist the term? Is there something objectionable about the prospect of assassinating, say, Osama Bin Laden? Isn't that a stated national goal? Isn't the assassination of leaders of polities that one is in an open war against a normal, accepted part of warfare? The discursive rub here seems to be that "CIA assassinations" is heavily tied up with the Church commission findings and subsequent executive orders barring political assassinations. But the key word there is "political," which is meant to indicate assassinations undertaken outside of the context of war, and for political (rather than legitimate security) reasons. I.e., killing foreign (or domestic) leaders or activists whose politics you don't like. Doing the same thing in the context of an actual war has never been unpopular, or carried the sorts of bad connotations that "CIA assassinations" do (part of which, by the way, is the incompetence of said CIA plots, rather than their nature as such). But then perhaps the term "CIA assassinations" is worth resisting, exactly because it confuses the issue. People understand that to refer to blowing up Castro with an exploding cigar or setting up civil rights activists for death, and subsuming that discourse into the Afghan war takes the focus off of the forces that really are doing stuff like that in the here and now (Mexican drug cartels, Russian intel/crime/oil complex, etc.). Drone warfare against armed parties who are openly at war with you is a different beast - and not one so reliably unpopular the sort of thing that "CIA assassinations" invokes in the public mind.
You're missing the point, which is that law school costs have exploded along with compensation for lawyers at firms and corporations. So, the only way to pay off your law school debts is to become a career for-profit lawyer. You can't make enough money to cover the debt if you work in the public interest sector, and so few lawyers (even those who really want to) do. This is not in the public interest - and this is relevant to the US Federal government exactly because the US federal government subsidizes the student loans for law students for the express reason that doing so is in the public interest. Without the federal loan subsidies, far fewer people could afford to attend law school at current prices, and the schools would have to lower tuiton, make far less money, etc. Which would actually result in more lawyers being able to afford to work in public interest - which is to say that law schools and private corporations are colluding to enrich themselves on the back of federal support, and at the expense of the public interest. You and I are footing the bill for this. Student loan debt has never been dischargable. Bankruptcy won't get rid of it. Pretty much nothing short of faking your own death and starting a new life somewhere else will get a person out from under that sort of debt.
Depends on who started the "war", and why, and how they identified their enemies. And another issue: it seems to take at least five or ten years for the actions of the CIA to emerge fully enough to discuss with evidence. A presumption of innocence in their current activities is not warranted by history. Irrelevancy. A focus on US governmental behavior is appropriate for US citizens regardless of the doings of Mexican drug cartels - who are not, btw, reliably separate from US intelligence agencies or their policies.
It's funny how 16,405 people watched the YouTube question in the op but only 499 people viewed the response. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ0jKO83NL0&feature=related How many people in this thread, including the op poster watched this?
Not really. The ethical status of assassinations in a war hinge on the question of whether the war itself is justified in the first place. Political assassination is bad pretty much regardless of who does it and why, and the reason for that is exactly because it's an end-run around the accepted, formalized means for settling political disputes (including warfare). To invoke the paradigm of political assassinations in a war context, then, is manipulative. Absent some evidence that there are actual political assassinations taking place, the drone strikes should be analyzed and evaluated on their own terms. Relevance? Are we analyzing Obama's drone strike policy, or some hypothesized CIA black ops? As is a focus on Mexican cartels using political violence to take over cities within walking distance of where I sit as I write this, or Russian syndicates assassinating journalists in London, etc., regardless of the doings of the CIA in Central Asia. There's no shortage of words, so I say keep "assassination" for cases of people demonstrably doing what people understand the word "assassination" to mean, and criticize things that don't fit that paradigm using other words. Note how quickly this flaw has led us astray, right here: we're entirely missing the really relevant aspect of the drone strike policy analysis and political support, which has to do with civilian casualties. And for what? To try to enforce a prejudicial term in hopes of papering over the fact that most Americans are enthusiastically in favor of assassinating the enemies in question? To derail into yet another recapitulation of the Cold War? Am I the only one that's bored to death of all of the sideways argumentation and petty purity tests around here?
Like what? Pretty much everything that could be called a failure stems from not having 60 votes in the senate. The Republican strategy is working, obstruct everything then blame Obama for not doing enough.
Uh, yeah - - We can ask, for example, whether an open state of war that existed between Cuba and the US redefines the attempts to kill Castro as not assassinations. And examine the current situation in Pakistan for parallels. So discussion of the validity or possibility of such demonstration would appear to be exactly on topic. Speak for yourself. No. Countzero is likewise bored, and on similar grounds.
The fact of the widespread condemnation of said assassination attempts as other than the "legitimate" wartime variety pretty decisively demonstrates that the state of said war was not "open" in the relevant sense. They wouldn't have been controversial otherwise, essentially by definition. It's a perpendicular relationship - if this stuff was in the same category as the Castro cigars, it would need to be hidden from the public. Instead, it's openly publicized. Did I speak for someone else there? Is there some substance to your disagreement, or do you merely wish it entered on the record? Funny, didn't you used to complain about people following you from thread to thread with a bunch of personal baggage?
Perspective and terminology I suppose it's a matter of terminology. Just out of curiosity, though, what is, in your opinion, an acceptable ratio for innocents killed compared to terrorists? 10:1? 100:1? I'm not just talking about the unfortunate costs of war here, but rather the question of how many civilians we should spend in order to get one alleged terrorist. For instance, Jane Mayer reported last year that in the course of sixteen missile strikes, between 207 and 321 "additional people" were killed in pursuit of one Baitullah Mehsud. So perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to use a word like "slaughter" to describe a 207:1 collateral damage ratio, especially when it's spread out over sixteen missile strikes for an average of just under thirteen people per incident, but what, in the end, is an acceptable ratio to you? No, that's part of the "slaughter". Perhaps it's all a matter of perceptions, though. For instance, from January: After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official. The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy." (Priest) And then April: The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday. (Shane) And then last week: The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen. (Apuzzo) So, yes, it is technically correct to say "the CIA is not assassinating anyone", as they haven't found their target yet. Indeed, I said, "plotting CIA assassinations". And that is exactly what the United States is doing. Or, I suppose, it's a matter of terminology. We're planning a "targeted killing". Or, at least, that's very much what it looks like. ____________________ Notes: Mayer, Jane. "The Predator War". The New Yorker. October 26, 2009. NewYorker.com. September 22, 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer Priest, Dana. "U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes". The Washington Post. January 27, 2010. WashingtonPost.com. September 22, 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/26/AR2010012604239.html Shane, Scott. "U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric". The New York Times. April 7, 2010; page A12. NYTimes.com. September 22, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html Apuzzo, Matt. "US considers terror charges for cleric al-Awlaki". Associaited Press. September 14, 2010. Chron.com. September 22, 2010. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/washington/7200064.html
I believe it comes down to more than that. Let's look at the meaning of the word. From Dictionary.com: "to kill suddenly or secretively, esp. a politically prominent person; murder premeditatedly and treacherously." The drone strikes are obviously sudden, but are they secret and directed at politically prominent people? That's debatable. I would say the armed leader of a militia openly at war with the US is more of a military figure than he is a political one. I would also say that assassination has a historical connotation, going back to the original assassins themselves, that denotes a kind of killing done by covert means for dubious political or financial gain. It is not, in other words, typically something thought of as moral. To return to the drone strikes, I cannot characterize them this way, nor can I call them immoral. Because it's illegal under US law, as you acknowledge below. But in terms of this site, and the "assassination" talk in general, because the people pushing the term are doing so for dubious political reasons or because they are just kooks and hate on anything the US does for its own national interest. Typically, as you touch on later, such killings in war are not described as assassination. When Yamato or Romel were killed by US warplanes in WW2, nobody described it as an assassination. If Hitler had been killed, I doubt it would have been described that way, either. I think you're on target here. But most of the people who use the term are unaware of its recent history, the Church committee and the larger historical tapestry. They also tend to be the sort of people who like to toss "war crime" around, too. Oh, please. That was 40 years ago, Ice. And the lame attempts to kill Castro, none of which even approached fruition, are a major reason the assissination ban was written in the first place.
