Newt Gingrich, who hopes to be the GOP nominee, and is also crazy. (via wilwheaton)
This is actually the most purely Presidential thing Newt Gingrich has said. He really comes off as an American President saying something like that. A regular Andrew Jackson or Barack Obama. Who the fuck cares about the law when you’re the leader of the “free world”? Thus it’s always been so.
Hmm, yes, IT WOULD SEEM SO LATELY.
Taking their cue from President Obama, many on the left have come to accept the “war on terror” paradigm they rejected back when that guy from Texas was president. And that little three-letter word, “war,” lowers an already pitifully low bar for when the state may legally take human life and, by extension, raises the threshold at which good bleeding-hearts ought to let their humanity kick in. It may be wrong for a mere citizen or policeman to take out a family of four as part of a quest for vengeance against a killer, but in war that’s just “collateral damage.” It sucks that 41 innocent Yemenis had to die as part of the U.S. government’s quest to kill folks like Awlaki, but don’t get yourself too worked up about it.
It’s certainly not illegal, after all.
By focusing on the mundane rather than the moral case for or against state-sanctioned murder, progressive commentators can sleep well at night despite having a bumper sticker for a killer on their car, their consciences soothed by legalistic rationalizations for extinguishing human life that they’d never accept from a friend or family member. Some even cheer death as long as it’s carried out by the state — and a fellow Democrat.
Charles Davis, “When It Comes to State-Sanctioned Murder, Morality Matters Most”
I know it’s another quote from the same article I just posted. But I just wanted to re-emphasize a point: Fuck your stupid war(s).
Whether lawyers serving the powerful can twist laws drafted by the powerful to serve the interests of power has absolutely no bearing on the morality of death-by-president. Indeed, when a single individual has the power to unilaterally decide who lives or dies, whether that’s permissible under some tortured reading of the Constitution and international law may not be irrelevant, but it isn’t exactly the most pertinent question.
What we ought to be talking about is whether murdering people with unmanned Predator drones based on evidence that will never see the light of day is, regardless of the target’s nationality, morally right or morally reprehensible. For those in the anti-murder camp, the answer is easy — and more relevant than whether a murder was in accordance with clause five of subsection B of the International Code on State-Sanctioned Killing.
