The Onion remains America’s Finest News Sourceā¢.
Quoting today’s masterpiece in full, though you should click through for the picture:
“WASHINGTONāStopping and turning around as he made his way across the South Lawn after hearing the unmanned aerial vehicle hovering just feet behind him, outgoing President Barack Obama tearfully shooed away a loyal MQ-9 Reaper drone attempting to follow him out of the White House, sources confirmed Friday. āGo on nowāget out of here!ā said the former commander-in-chief, his lower lip trembling and his eyes welling with tears as he affected a stern tone of voice in an attempt to scare off the faithful hunter-killer drone that had spent the past eight years obediently at his side. āYou canāt come with me anymore, you got that? Canāt you see this is for your own good? Now scram. What are you waiting for? Go!ā At press time, a heartbroken Obama had thrown a rock in the droneās direction, causing the unmanned aerial vehicle to flee into the sky, where it paused to look back one last time at its old master before flying off toward a Yemeni tribal wedding.”
The idea that Barack Obama has been too aggressive in fighting the Islamists is an “interesting” point of view.
Oh those pesky Yemeni tribal wedding š
*face palm*
I look forward to your serious geopolitical critique of an Onion article.
Blowing up weddings –and killing shitloads of innocents— is not my idea of “fighting Islam”.
Putting America’s boots to the Saudi’s might have been a better idea.
As if Obama gave a rat’s arse.
In the spirit of competition, The Onion
has a rising, pert, starlet “threatening” their place on the marquis.
http://thepeoplescube.com/
The Nice folks at Wiki have been awarded the Streisand Effect for free
“ink” Award, for their “Banned In Boston” thumbs up endorsement.
“Wiki” replacement https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
MAY be valuable
Instapundit also used to criticize Obama regularly over the use of drones.
My only critique of Obama over drones is that he didn’t use them enough – that is – as much as he could have, along with whatever other military hardware he had.
Jacob (January 21, 2017 at 4:35 pm), Obama used drones to fight war on the cheap and out of sight of voters. Often, to win, you must grasp the nettle boldly, put boots on the ground, etc. – you must want to win, not just want to prevent the problem becoming an electoral inconvenience. In short, wanting Obama to have fought harder and wanting him to have done more drone strikes is not necessarily the same thing.
There is also the question of whether Obama did in fact knowingly order the drone killing of a legal US citizen. If he did, that citizen may well have deserved death, but some kind of due process before or legal inquest after could be a healthy check-and-balance.
“There is also the question of whether Obama did in fact knowingly order the drone killing of a legal US citizen.”
Question?
There’s no question.
And then, a few weeks later, he killed his 15-year-old American son with another drone strike.
You want to win, alright, but you also want to avoid losses, which is also a desirable goal. So you use what tool you have. Drones are a good weapon.
As to that American citizen: as long as he went to Yemen (or wherever) and engaged in terrorism, he gave up the rights that a normal citizen enjoys. Had he come to the US and surrendered, he would have deserved a fair trial.
If Saudi Arabia fell its oil would go to the Islamic Republic of Iran (many of the people in the oil region are Shia).
As for Yemen – the Fiver Shia there are being turned into 12er Shia (by the Islamic Republic of Iran) the long term objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to dominate all of Arabia – in order to have the economic power to do much harm.
Saudi Arabia is a small country – the Islamic Republic of Iran is far more dangerous, and it is backed by both Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As for Mr Obama – his chief fault in relation to Islamists was to not take them alive for information – as he does not believe in intelligence gathering (for example he would have closed Gitmo had he been allowed to). Still killing a few of the terrorists from time-to-time is a virtue not a vice.
About the only thing Mr Obama does NOT deserve to be attacked for.
No, actually he didn’t. He retained those rights. Now, were we in some sort of declared war, that might not be true, but Obama made the choice to run everything by illegal executive order, bypassing Congress’s input.
The point isn’t whether this guy “deserved” to die. He probably did. The point is that Obama, at every opportunity, chose to discard constitutionally-required checks and simply acted illegally, knowing that Congress had insufficient balls to try to enforce the law.
A good account Jacob.
I meant to type that the Islamic Republic of Iran is backed by Putin’s Russia and by the People’s Republic of China.
Of the two the People’s Republic of China will, in the end, prove to be more dangerous – the regime (not the people – the regime) is the problem, as is the case with Putin’s Russia also (although in the case of Putin it is more of a personal thing – not really an ideological regime).
As for “innocents” – actually a smaller proportion of fire goes astray than ever before in history.
No one despises Mr Obama more than I do – but attacking him for targeting “innocents” is nonsense.
Was Mr Obama misquoted:‘I have my pen and my drone’?
Maybe Obama’s actions against terrorists in Yemen required congressional approval, and maybe not – I have no opinion, I don’t know.
That has nothing to do with the specific American terrorist. As long as he went to fight alongside jihadists, the protections of the US constitution do not apply to him.
Those criticizing Obama for specifically targeting this individual are wrong. I applaud Obama’s action.
By the way: it was not Obama, personally, who fought against the jihadists (and used drones). They were not his private drones. It was the US army.
I reject the criticism aimed at Obama because the use of drones.
Jacob: I’m very interested in knowing how and when exactly a US citizen forfeits his constitutionally protected rights to due process without, well, due process. If the US gov’t wanted him dead for treason or other high crimes they still need to establish that he’s guilty of those crimes. The place to do that is in the courts. A gov’t where the executive can just deny constitutional rights from it’s citizens by decree is called a tyranny.
He denied having fought alongside anyone. So, let’s present the evidence against him, and then allow him to present his defense.
. . .
Oh, yeah. Too late. Sorry. Maybe next time. š³
Wait, you say you KNOW he was guilty? Well, that’s different. Who told you this? . . . The New York Times? Yeah, I guess we shouldn’t ever question anything that our great national media tell us. I’d gladly kill someone on the say-so of the New York Times.
The United States intentionally killed tens of thousands of its own grey-coated citizens from 1861 to 1865.
Hundreds of U. S. citizens, some babies, were killed by manned U. S. drones between 1942 and 1945.
Not a one had the slightest hint of due process of law.
Constitutional rights apply where the stars and stripes fly, not in enemy countries.
It’s not a question of whether that person “gave up” any constitutional rights; he didn’t. But anyone in a battlefield is a legitimate target, by any military tool or technique. That part doesn’t bother me at all; enemy combatants (whatever their citizenship) don’t get due process.*
The part that bothers me is, as bobby b noted, that it was (is) an illegal war. The President has no constitutional authority to declare war. The War Powers Resolution (enacted to rein in Nixon) specifies precisely the steps the President has to take in order to (a) deploy US forces** and (b) keep them there. Obama ignored that law, and Congress was too cowardly to call him on it. He should have been impeached over it (but see the word “cowardly” in the preceding sentence.)
* And, FWIW, enemy combatants who are not fighting for a legitimate country are also not entitled to any protections under the Geneva Conventions, not that that is the issue at hand.
** “Forces” includes drones, by the way.
Mr. Marks, my reading comprehension has been dropping with the passage of decades of hard living, and sometimes I get a jarring reminder of it, like now, when I read your placing of quotation marks around the word “innocents” in that sentence as pretty much your repudiation of several first principles that I thought you held dear, which must mean that I’ve misread something yet again.
When did the legal term “innocent” switch to being an emotional term? Or do we now honor two different meanings as convenient?
This isn’t just some angels/pinhead wordgame off to the side of the main issue. This wasn’t a war. Obama refused to make it a war for two reasons. First, he wasn’t sure Congress would agree. Second, he didn’t want Congress to interfere in how he wanted to personally run the entire Middle East war, of which said war he made a dog’s breakfast.
Had he let Congress in, that interference would likely have added at least some competence to the situation. Allowing Obama to execute Americans without a war declaration is part of that slippery slope that gave us a war run solely, and badly, by Obama.
“Allowing Obama to execute Americans”
If the war is illegal than any killing is illegal – not only of Americans. It doesn’t matter if you kill Americans of foreigners. This harping on the “constitutional rights of Americans” in this case is ridiculous. Killing anybody, American or not, is exactly the same crime.
I would criticize Obama for not pursuing the war against terrorism vigorously enough (as Trump did criticize), and not for doing the little he did do (using drones).
You can’t have it both ways.
Not deliberately. The son was collateral damage from an attack on someone else. They didn’t know he was there.
At the same time, they knew the target wasn’t alone and that potentially innocent people would die in the attack.
When the Onion got bought out by Univision, in turn owned by a Hillary Clinton backer, and when the Onion abandoned its mission of true satire in order to pursue partisan bullshit, it earned every last bit of ire. bile, hate, and discontent which may be mustered by Mr. Marks.
I too look forward to seeing what he does to that failed institution.
Not any more:
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/hillarys-top-donor-buys-onion-starts-publishing-propaganda-immediately/
This is The Onion now:
https://www.yahoo.com/tv/5-things-know-milo-yiannopoulos-212751284.html