Drones allow America to violate national borders for selective killing

The chief selling point for America's drone program is that rather than the mass killing of all out war, drones allow us to violate the boundaries of other nations, e.g., Pakistan, and kill targeted individuals. Of course, that's based on the either-or fallacy that all out war or drone attacks are the only U.S. options. It seems the White House, under both Bush and Obama, has consistently refused to consider a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, which would include education and outreach.

Was anyone listening recently when Mallala Yousafzai told President Obama that drones create terrorists?

Today the Huffington Post headline above Matt Sledge's article reads: Why did America kill my mother?

Sledge writes:

WASHINGTON -- He thought little of the U.S. drone buzzing over his family's house one day last year, its incessant sound just one more addition to the rhythm of daily life in northwest Pakistan. 

As he walked home from school, his grandmother told him to eat a snack before coming to the field to help her pick okra. It was the eve of one of the holiest holidays in Islam, when they would gather for a favorite family dish. He went outside.

Dum, dum -- the sounds of missiles pierced the air.

"All of a sudden things became very dark," Zubair Rehman, 13, remembered. The next thing he knew, his grandmother, Mamana Bibi, was gone. "It was like she was exploded to pieces."

Read more:

“The president of the United States is not the Godfather”

Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

It’s odd, you know, when I first read in the NY Times of President Obama’s personal culpability in selecting targets for death by drone, I was stunned.  I believed this would effectively end Obama’s hopes for a second term. Americans simply would not stand for this. 

After all, Obama was originally elected on the basis of his anti-war speech as an Illinois state representative. Recall also that shortly after his inauguration, he received a Nobel peace prize for his lofty vision. We had a right, I thought, to expect this man to lead the nation toward a more ethical and just role in the world.

So then I began to read accusations from Republicans that the Administration intentionally leaked the story to the Times to bolster Obama’s image as a tough, macho leader who had no qualms about dealing death to alleged enemies and any noncombatants who happened to be within range of his drone-fired missiles.

Could this be true?

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes:

What is remarkable about the recent leaks is the coincidence -- it can only be that -- that they all made the president look good, heroic, decisive, strong, and even a touch cruel -- born, as the birthers long suspected, not in Hawaii but possibly on the lost planet Krypton. The leak that displayed all these Obamian attributes was the one that said the president personally approves the assassinations of terrorists abroad. He gives his OK and the bad guys are dispatched via missiles from drones.

Cohen continues:

The leak that troubles me concerns the killing of suspected or actual terrorists. The triumphalist tone of the leaks -- the Tarzan-like chest-beating of various leakers -- not only is in poor taste but shreds a long-standing convention that, in these matters, the president has deniability. The president of the United States is not The Godfather.

Read more:

With a push from his VP, President Obama affirms gay marriage

Photo credits: Public Domain.

As one who has frequently criticized President Obama’s timidity in supporting causes that might anger the extreme Right, I applaud his publicly stated affirmation of gay marriage – even though Joe Biden likely forced his hand.

Adam Nagourney at the NY Times analyzes the potential impact of Obama’s evolved position on a still controversial issue:

President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage on Wednesday was by any measure a watershed. A sitting United States president took sides in what many people consider the last civil rights movement, providing the most powerful evidence to date of how rapidly views are moving on an issue that was politically toxic just five years ago. 

Mr. Obama faces considerable risk in jumping into this debate, reluctantly or not, in the heat of what is expected to be a close election. The day before he announced his position, voters in North Carolina — a critical state for Mr. Obama and the site of the Democratic convention this summer — approved by a 20-point margin a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. It was the 31st state to pass such an amendment. 

As George W. Bush demonstrated in 2004, when his campaign engineered initiatives against gay marriage in a series of swing states, opponents are far more likely to vote on these issues than supporters. Mitt Romney, the probable Republican presidential candidate, was quick to proclaim his opposition to gay marriage after Mr. Obama spoke. And however much national attitudes may be shifting, the issue remains highly contentious among black and Latino voters, two groups central to Mr. Obama’s success. 

Yet as Mr. Obama has clearly come to recognize, the forces of history appear to be changing. The president was at risk of seeming politically timid and calculating, standing at the sidelines while a large number of Americans — including members of both parties — embraced gay marriage. That is a particularly discordant image, many Democrats said, for the man who was the nation’s first black president. 

Mr. Obama’s declaration may have been belated and unplanned, forced out after his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., during a television interview on Sunday declared his support for same-sex marriage. Still, it is a huge voice added to a chorus that has become increasingly robust, a reminder that a view that had once been relegated to the dark sidelines of political debate has become mainstream. 

Read more:

Romney the politician vs. Obama the would-be “transformative president”

I don’t get it. Why is the media so stirred up over Mitt Romney’s portrayal as a politician? The Etch-a-Sketch candidate, etc. Would our astute pundits prefer that Mitt pose as a saintly gentleman, far above politics, who once elected will ride into Washington on a white horse and drive out all of the evildoers? Oops. That was Barack Obama in ’08. And he didn’t even wait until he assumed office; he lunged to the center immediately after the DNC anointed him as nominee.

As recently as last September, liberal NY Times columnist Charles Blow, who supported Obama’s candidacy from day one, asked his readers:

 

Does he have any interest in becoming the Obama of people’s imaginations, the one they thought they saw through the showers of streamers, and explosions of confetti in 2008 — the man who only ever existed in their own minds? 

Is the “transformative president” more than an opportunistic transformer, shifting shape to suit the moment, but truly settling on none? 

Blow continues:

He {Obama} isn’t only battling a calcifying cynicism about the inefficacy of government in general, he’s battling the rapidly hardening public perception that he himself is a product of what I call the doughnut doctrine of leadership — soft, glazy, hollow in the middle and ideally suited for getting dunked.

Ouch.

An unimpressed customer ignores Obama at the Good Stuff Eatery (photo)

Image credit: Pete Souza/White House

You have to love this photo of President Obama and his advisors enjoying burgers at the Good Stuff Eatery the day before Obama’s 50^th birthday as an unimpressed customer seated a few feet away checks out her cell phone.

The worst bet in all of politics

Gale  Russell Chaddock at the Christian Science Monitor offers a lucid analysis of where Congress is now with debt ceiling negotiations, and it’s not pretty.

Washington

 

After a night of high drama on Capitol Hill, a legislative solution to the debt crisis now shifts to the Senate, where leaders of both parties must now try to guess what will pass in the House – perhaps the worst bet in all of politics.

The situation is the result of strategic mistakes in the buildup to Friday's debt-ceiling votes, which produced an outcome exactly the opposite of what GOP leaders had hoped. Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio had hoped to win support from House Democrats this week by scaling back the House's earlier “cut, cap, and balance” bill. With Democratic support in the House, the bill would have had a credible shot in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Instead, his proposal alienated not only House Democrats but also the president and GOP conservatives. After an aborted attempt to hold a vote Thursday, an amended bill did at last pass the House Friday, 218 to 210, but without a single Democratic vote and without 22 Republican defectors. Later Friday, it failed in the Senate, which voted to table Mr. Boehner's bill, 59 to 41, effectively derailing it.

Read more:

Federal Budget agreement: the EPA and Planned Parenthood escape Republican axe

In reaching a federal budget agreement Friday evening, the AP reports:

On side issues – "riders," the negotiators called them – the Democrats and the White House rebuffed numerous Republican attempts to curtail the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They also sidetracked their demand to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood. Under the accord, the issue will come to a vote in the Senate under terms guaranteed to end in its defeat.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace Tim Kaine as chair of the DNC

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Vice President Joe Biden announced President Barack Obama's choice of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace Tim Kaine as chair of the Democratic National Committee in a Tuesday evening email to committee members:

Friend - 

President Obama has asked me to share some important news with you about the future of the Democratic Party.

Today, Tim Kaine announced that he is stepping down as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee to run for the U.S. Senate from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Chairman Kaine has been an incredible leader for the Democratic Party and our nation - and our party is stronger today than it has ever been thanks to his leadership.

But now he is embarking on a new journey. As Chairman Kaine departs, new leadership must come on. And the President wanted you to be among the very first to hear that his choice to lead the DNC is none other than Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Debbie has served the people of Florida - first in the Florida State Legislature, and more recently in Congress - for nearly two decades. During that time, she has fought for America's children, seniors, and men and women in uniform.

In selecting Debbie to lead our party, President Obama noted her tenacity, her strength, her fighting spirit, and her ability to overcome adversity. President Obama expressed great admiration for her as a leader, and he was honored that she accepted this important challenge on behalf of the Democratic Party.

No one should have any doubt that Debbie will work hard to strengthen our party and our country. I hope you will welcome her as President Obama's choice for the next Chair of the DNC.

-Joe

Wasserman Schultz has represented Florida's 20th district in the House since her election in 2004, and she will reportedly not give up her seat when she assumes leadership of the DNC.

Hillary Clinton supporters in the 08 primary recall Wasserman Schultz as an impassioned supporter of their candidate. In recent months, she has appeared alongside Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in support of their good friend Gabby Giffords, who remains hospitalized from a gunshot wound to the head.

Mubarak bows out after Obama urges him not to run for another term

Mubarak and Obama in calmer times (photo from the public domain).

 

Events in Egypt have moved quickly today. Kirkpatrick and Landler at the NY Times reported minutes ago:

CAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not run for another term in elections scheduled for the fall, appearing on state television to promise an orderly transition but he would serve out his term. In comments translated by CNN, he swore that he would die in Egypt.

Television cameras showed the vast crowds gathered in central Tahrir Square in Cairo roaring, but not necessarily in approval. The protesters have made the president’s immediate and unconditional resignation a bedrock demand of their movement, and it did not appear that the concession would mollify them.

Mr. Mubarak’s announcement came after President Obama urged him not to run, effectively withdrawing American support for its closest Arab ally, according to American diplomats in Cairo and Washington. 

Read more:

Is civility an insufficient goal for our national discourse?

Civil Discourse Please Dialogue Men's T-Shirt by KR Designs

Kathleen Reardon, a professor of management at the Univ. of Southern Cal. Marshall School of business, offers an insightful discussion of calls for greater civility since the Tucson shooting.  

 Reardon writes:

 I've been thinking about the calls for greater civility delivered eloquently by President Obama and many in the media. David Brooks, for example, with whom on occasion I've disagreed, wrote of civility as "the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation." The conversation is our engagement in "social enterprise" -- listening to the views of others so that we might improve our own.

Civility usually refers to politeness and courtesy extended to others. When this becomes rare, confrontation is more frequent and disdain more common. Tensions between people arise and escalate quickly. When others must be wrong in order for us to be right, civility suffers.

Civility, therefore, is good. But recent calls for greater civility remind me of calls in the past for tolerance toward people not of your own race, religion, gender or nationality. Tolerance is better than no tolerance, but it's not as admirable a goal as appreciation. Civility is better than incivility, but not half as socially substantive as empathy and compassion.

So, to start with civility is an insufficient goal for a society seeking to raise the tenor of its public and private discourse.

Read more:

Secretary Clinton skips Obama’s first State of the Union speech

“Madam Secretary sends her regrets,” so writes Washington Post columnist Al Kamen:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got a pass last week from President Obama to skip Wednesday night's State of the Union speech. (We had heard she begged to be excused, but apparently it didn't come to that.)

Seems there's an important international meeting Wednesday in London on battling radicalization in Yemen, and then another, long-planned conference there Thursday on development and security in Afghanistan.

So while the president struggles to regain his footing after being rudely shoved aside by a pickup-driving Republican in Mass., Secretary Clinton will be joining world powers in seeking ways to support the Yemeni government’s efforts to combat its local branch of Al Quaeda, which has claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack in the U.S.

Clinton will also meet with representatives of 60 nations on stabilizing Afghanistan and transferring control from international forces to the Afghanis.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather be in Hillary's shoes today than Obama's.

Secretary Clinton Quietly Revolutionizes American Foreign Policy

In today’s Washington Post, David Rothkopf offers a must-read column on how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is revolutionizing American foreign policy despite the daily onslaught of sexism and misogyny issuing from our dangerously immature and ill-informed media.

Rothkopf points out:

Clinton is not the first celebrity to become the nation's top diplomat -- that honor goes to her most distant predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who by the time he took office was one of the most famous and gossiped-about men in America -- but she may be the biggest. And during her first seven months in office, the former first lady, erstwhile presidential candidate and eternal lightning rod has drawn more attention for her moods, looks, outtakes and (of course) relationship with her husband than for, well, her work revamping the nation's foreign policy.

Read more:

Note: Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" and "Running the World: The Inside Story of the NSC and the Architects of American Power.”

Medal of Freedom Recipient Billie Jean King: Obama “Cute” and “Sweet” in Flubbing her Stats

In 1973, married with two school-age children, I was a full-time nontraditional student at Rochester Community College in Rochester, Minn. when tennis champion Billie Jean King smacked down Bobby Riggs in three straight matches. After class that day, I asked Dr. Mary Goette, my psychology professor, what she thought of King’s defeat of her male challenger. Dr. Goette said with a smile, “Well, we’ve always known that women were smarter than men, now we know they are better athletes, too.”

On Wednesday, Aug. 12, King achieved another victory over sexism in her smack down of President Obama’s inaccurate report of her stats when presenting her with the Medal of Freedom. I had to chuckle reading Politico’s account of King’s response in which she brushes off Obama’s mistakes as “cute” and “sweet.” In effect, King good-naturedly reverses the incident in Detroit when Candidate Obama replied to a question by a female reporter with, “Hold on a minute, Sweetie.”

Carol Lee reports:

“They didn’t get any of my facts right,” King lightheartedly noted afterward. “Did you see all the – how many titles I won? I was cracking up.”

There’s more:

Asked what Obama got wrong, she {King} said, “Well the Grand Slam’s at 39 not at 12.”

“That’s not what’s important,” she {King} explained. So when Obama got it wrong, “I thought even was more cute...I go, ‘Oh that’s really sweet.’ Like, just move on, get off the tennis stuff. Tennis was a platform.”

My former psychology professor, Dr. Goette, was right: Billie Jean King continues to demonstrate today that women are both smarter than men and better athletes.

Watch the video of Carol Lee’s interview with King here.

Tina Brown: The Falsehood of Obama Campaign’s Charge of Racism Against Bill Clinton

God knows I’ve referenced often enough at Katalusis Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s repeated debunking of the Obama campaign’s attempts to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton as racists. Yet I thought I’d never see the day when another prominent old media/new media writer would actually speak the truth on this particular issue.

Tina Brown at the Daily Beast chides Obama for his beer diplomacy scheduled today with Professor Gates and Police Officer Crowley and suggests the current president might benefit from the political skills of former president Clinton in attending to a more pressing matter - legislating a decent health care reform bill.

Ms. Brown writes (emphasis mine):

It looks like Obama would rather live on cheeseburgers than let Clinton get into the act on health care—or on anything else, for that matter. Maybe he thinks there’s no stage big enough for both these two Mount Rushmore megastars and never will be. Despite surface cordiality and self-restraint for Hillary’s sake, the former president’s wounds from the harsh charge of racism on the campaign, a falsehood on which Obama created his "post-racialism" campaign, remain deep, and they are not assuaged by the coolly minimal lip service a still mistrustful Obama pays to Bill’s presidential wisdom. “Sure, he calls me every few weeks,” the former president told a person I know. “But it feels as if, you know, he’s just checking a box.”

Isn’t this the racial reconciliation that should be taking place over a beer at the White House?

Good question, Tina.

Will the Obama Cult Result in a Failed Presidency?

Lexington (the Economist) offers quite a warning in the title of a recent post, “The Obama Cult: If Barack Obama Disappoints His Supporters, They Will Have Only Themselves To Blame.” Lexington tells us that appalled by the hubris of presidential candidates in 2007, ‘“a libertarian scholar called Gene Healy wrote “The Cult of the Presidency”, a book decrying the unrealistic expectations Americans have of their presidents. The book was written while Barack Obama’s career was still on the launch pad, yet it describes with uncanny prescience the atmosphere that allowed him to soar.”

Lexington need not have reminded us of the excesses of Obama supporters during his campaign:

Mr Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern American politician. People scream and faint at his rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser”. An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.” He sets foreign hearts fluttering, too. A Pew poll published this week finds that 93% of Germans expect him to do the right thing in world affairs. Only 14% thought that about Mr Bush.

And we are also given to know that Obama has been complicit in the adoration of his followers:

Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”. As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons. On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”).

After pointing out the several aways in which Obama has already fallen short in fulfilling his campaign promises, Lexington offers this conclusion:

All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong.

Students, er, Senators Miss Professor-in-Chief’s Deadline for Health Care Reform Bill

I know. I know. Just last night the Professor-in-Chief explained the importance of setting deadlines for his wayward students, er, senators; otherwise, they’d never get anything done. That’s why he told them they had to turn in their completed papers, er, health care reform bill, before their summer break.

But What’s this? Those darned kids - senators - must not have been listening. Donna Smith and Kim Dixon at Reuters report:

President Barack Obama's drive for healthcare reform suffered a setback on Thursday when Senate leaders said they would not be able to pass the measure before leaving for a monthlong August recess.

The day after Obama's prime-time news conference to sell the healthcare proposal, congressional leaders struggled to ease doubts about the plan and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the full chamber would not take up the bill until after its monthlong recess that begins on Aug. 7.

"We'll come back in the fall" to work on the bill in the full Senate, he told reporters.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was "more confident than ever" that Congress would meet Obama's timetable of passing a bill by the end of the year, but the initial vote might not come as quickly as hoped.

"We will take the bill to the floor when it is ready, and when it is ready we will have the votes to pass it," Pelosi told reporters.

The reform package under construction in both chambers of Congress has been besieged from all sides by criticism about its more than $1 trillion price tag and its scope, with debates raging behind closed doors over how to pay for the program and rein in healthcare costs.

Read More: