With the Senate confirmation hearings of John Brennan (“Father John” above — Obama’s morally repugnant nominee for CIA Director), plus the controversy around Zero Dark Thirty, and Obama’s “KILL LIST” all receiving prominent attention in the news, these days, I thought it appropriate to reprint the above political cartoon before returning to my series on race relations in 2013 America.
Although The New York Times had just published a high-profile article about the existence of this (Bush-worthy) program when my cartoon was first published (6/10/12), many Democrats, liberals, and nominal progressives were still in the dark (willfully, it seems) with regard to Obama’s extrajudicial killing program — including his “signature strikes.” (Signature Strikes explained: if the Yemenis/Somalis/Libyans/etc. on the ground look like militants, we launch our Hellfire missiles first and ask questions about their identities and guilt/innocence later — meaning never. It’s the same profiling principle that left young Trayvon Martin dead at the hands of George Zimmerman — just for walking around with Skittles, iced tea, and a hoodie in the wrong Florida neighborhood while black. It’s also the principle/policy that explains how an ANTI-al Qaeda cleric in Yemen was recently murdered in a U.S. missile strike.)
But back when the above cartoon was first published, it was easier to deny the very existence of this radically un-American program (despite the news reports). Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) even had the gall to treat one interviewer as if he were a total loon for questioning her about Obama’s “kill list” (“I’m happy to answer any serious questions,” she responded condescendingly).
Well, the president’s reflexively dishonest, torture-defending, blood-stained nominee to head the nation’s premier intelligence agency has dragged the policy out into the open… so the unprincipled left should can the ostrich routine (and they should also, as Glenn Greenwald has been arguing, make their apologies to Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld and the rest of that war-criminal cabal — with whom, when it comes to Washington’s post-9/11 radical departure from our Constitution, they apparently wholeheartedly AGREE).