I can't believe people here are actually rationalizing this.
If Bush had ordered the assassination of an American citizen, people here would be howling for his head.
This is hypocrisy of the highest order.
WASHINGTON — 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.
Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam, is in hiding in Yemen. He has been the focus of intense scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, and then to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.
No charges, no trial, no conviction. Just a decree by one man - the "Unitary Executive," it seems, is here for good, and his powers have expanded in terrifying measure. But it's Obama, and he's our President. The good guy, right?
You know this is wrong. You know this is an unbelievable transgression of Presidential and Constitutional authority.
Try for just a minute to imagine Bush is President again and that he, the loathed one, is the one ordering this.
Close your eyes and imagine what your reaction would be if it were Bush doing this exact thing.
Close your eyes and imagine another President - an unknown quantity. Perhaps John McCain; or, god help us, the woman who succeeded him after he succumbed to a fatal bout with carcinoma or a gargantuan stroke. Imagine that monument to banality and venality, issuing a standing kill order against a "domestic terrorist" of her choosing: the last remaining provider of late term abortions, after they're finally outlawed?
Now react accordingly to Obama's behavior.
Because he has just opened the door to any President doing whatever he or she damned well pleases. There were no checks and balances in the issuing of this assassination order. Congress was not consulted, ladies and gentlemen. The President simply gave the order to kill an American citizen without due process, and that American citizen is now a dead man walking.
Who's next?