Killing time

Much is being made by folks on the left in the U.S. from Glenn Greenwald to the Rude Pundit about the speech this week by Attorney General Eric Holder on the legality of the President killing American citizens without any sort of trial or other judicial process. As Stephen Colbert described it, Holder's argument is that the U.S. constitution promises "due process" not judicial process - that as long as there is a standard process followed in every case, everything is nice and legal. And that due process at the moment is that the president and his advisers discuss matters and decide which American citizen they want to kill. And then they kill them.
Pretty nasty stuff, to be sure and I agree with Glennzilla and his Rudeness that Obama's dogged continuation of some of the worst excesses of the Bush regime is despicable.
But speaking as a not-American, welcome to our world U.S. citizens! Your government has been killing us clearly inferior not-Americans all over the globe for many many years now - sometimes by proxy, sometimes with drones, sometimes with airstrikes, sometimes with your military and espionage agencies, sometimes for commercial considerations, sometimes for revenge, sometime just for shits and giggles - with near total impunity. And most of the time, the vast majority of you have been okay with that.
I'm not saying that every instance of the United States government killing people is wrong. We were quite pleased you finally pitched in and helped defeat Hitler after a couple of years of watching from the sidelines. What I am saying is that it is tough for us not-Americans to get too upset about the U.S. Government deciding that it is going to level the playing field and start killing Americans just like it kills everybody else. 
I know this is upsetting for some of you what with that notion of American exceptionalism and all that, but I figure maybe, just maybe, if you know you are in the same boat as the rest of the world when it comes to the U.S. government being able to whack you at the drop of a hat for any reason at all, no questions asked, you might start to think that letting the government kill people, any people, isn't such a hot idea. You might even start to think that its a bad idea to threaten to bomb countries just because it's an election year and the yahoo contingent want a "strong" leader.



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