Posts Tagged With: drone wars

Kudos to Ben for highlighting the Obama administration’s lawless drone violence. Undoubtedly, the best article I ever read from this past election cycle was by Conor Friersdorf, on the topic of Obama’s drone wars. Wrote Friersdorf:

[I]f you’re a Democrat who has affirmed that you’d never vote for an opponent of gay equality, or a torturer, or someone caught using racial slurs, how can you vote for the guy who orders drone strikes that kill hundreds of innocents and terrorizes thousands more — and who constantly hides the ugliest realities of his policy (while bragging about the terrorists it kills) so that Americans won’t even have all the information sufficient to debate the matter for themselves?

How can you vilify Romney as a heartless plutocrat unfit for the presidency, and then enthusiastically recommend a guy who held Bradley Manning in solitary and killed a 16-year-old American kid? If you’re a utilitarian who plans to vote for Obama, better to mournfully acknowledge that you regard him as the lesser of two evils, with all that phrase denotes.

But I don’t see many Obama supporters feeling as reluctant as the circumstances warrant.

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers — just aren’t valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama’s tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man’s transgressions, have done over and over again.

Keen on Obama’s civil-libertarian message and reassertion of basic American values, I supported him in 2008. Today I would feel ashamed to associate myself with his first term or the likely course of his second. I refuse to vote for Barack Obama. Have you any deal-breakers? 

(Emphases added.)

The election has shown that millions of voters do not in fact have any deal-breakers, but rather will happily—joyfully—vote for someone whose behavior they would have vociferously condemned if engaged in by a Republican. I will go to my grave before I understand why Obama supporters apparently believe that continued funding for PBS is more important than ending the bombing of innocent civilians. But their willingness to accept horrible violence overseas in return for Big Bird and gay marriage at home can only be described as tragic.