Drone-Killing Presidents Aren’t the Problem

by paradox

Few things are as irritating in life than the generalizing of yourself or group you belong to as being flat-out wrong, and it gets a lot worse when said individual is in a media position to spread the inaccuracy widely. The chump performing this evolution of irritation today is one Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who blithely classifies liberals as weenies because [they are] uncomfortable with the idea of their president as a drone-deploying killer.

I’m not foolish enough to claim voice to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but this liberal will respond to this ridiculous assertion by Goldberg with a reasonable confidence many liberals share the same general view and values.

The assertion of unease at the idea of the President of the United States being a killer is preposterous. A good student of history and educated in political science, I’m fully aware of the rank militarization of our country since WWII, it’s many disgusting and futile military adventures both big and small since, and naturally an American national security state run amok and out of control since 9/11.

Of course the President can be a killer if need be, he’s head of the greatest military the world has ever seen belonging to bellicose, irrational fearful Republic with a huge history of violence and aggression.

Furthermore, Mr. Goldberg, the American life I’ve weaved through has left me intimately familiar with violence, cruelty, neglect, serious wounds and death, these are not strange elements to me in our amber waves of grain existence, no. I enlisted for the wartime institutionalized version, too, I was perfectly aware of who was at the top of the chain of command.

So perhaps the next time you’re stupid enough to make generalizations about liberals and the Presidency, Mr. Goldberg, you’ll remember who I am, along with the knowledge I’m not at all unique, the naïve tentative caricature you’ve stitched in your mushy brain of liberals is totally, grossly inaccurate. Mr. Journalism, seeker of truth, spreader of facts. Yes indeed.

Now then. When a President decides a bad guy is known to be in a certain place, has an Arleigh Burke class destroyer parked forty miles away and fires a Tomahawk cruise missile to take him out he or she has committed an act of war.

Imagine going to work one day in your humble city block and United Kingdom leadership decides a bad guy is in the building next door, an ordinary day is shattered as a missile streaks by and destroys the adjacent building in a roaring blast of flames and debris. The missile kills one of your cousins in an error, whoops, that bad guy was actually in the next block over.

That act of aggression flagrantly violates numerous modes of law and ethics, duh, the only time you’re allowed to use it is in times of war authorized by Congress. Somehow we have lied and deluded to ourselves as Americans that firing Hellfire missiles in Sudan is just sort of a red light violation in our world, no biggie.

By god and baby freaking Jesus it is a very big deal, we kill a great number of innocents—inflaming a lot of hatred toward us, of course—in a plain act of war we would never, ever accept upon our own citizens. Furthermore, it horribly plants the seeds of escalation, of course one day the missiles won’t work anymore so troops and tanks are necessary.

Plus the horrifying potential of spreading out of control, the President and Executive branch are perfectly aware there is no legal way in the legal and political framework we’re normally aware of for them to declare war willy-nilly on numerous countries just because they want to launch 40 cruise missiles in the next 6 months.

So one keeps the whole evolution “secret” and “classified,” make it a crime for journalists to report on drones, and in a lying, illegal twist of a force authorization from Congress actually get a secret war classification on certain pipsqueak relatively powerless countries. The best guess we have now is that the United States is at war with five countries.

One has to guess, because if one goes to a Pentagon spokesperson and asks how many countries we’re at war with the answer comes back as classified!

Out of control, I don’t choose my words lightly. That’s what drones have given us, Mr. Goldberg, endless secret war from a broken Congress that could so easily run amok with a different President in place, what’s to stop he or she from firing a missile into Panama in 2018 because it fits political ends that have nothing to do with “security?”

Nothing. I’m horribly worried and appalled at what drones have done to the United States and other human beings, not just because they can kill by Presidential order, I hope that’s clear, Mr. Goldberg.