An exceedingly callow young denizen of Thinktankistan called Michael Kugelman has undertaken the task of teaching Pakistanis to stop worrying and love the drone, or at least put up with it, in an op-ed in the online Dawn, and Matt Taibbi just savages him for it, in his own blog:
So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don't Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren't mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they're mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!
He also tears a fine new one for the authors of a Times editorial in favor of a drone court, though he misses Emptywheel's insight, which I think is indispensable, that it would be a system for punishing crimes before they are committed.
Aerial Target: Design for an unmanned, radio-operated plane for use against Zeppelin aircraft and controlled bomb, 1916.
Taibbi includes the first real discussion I've seen of the issue of cowardice in drone fighting:
Attorney General Eric Holder has finally come forward to explain how it's legal under certain circumstances for the President to order the killing of a US citizen, and it isn't very pretty. For the argumentation and a learned critique, I'll refer you to today's series of posts by EmptyWheel, starting maybe with this one, which lays out Holder's claim that the "due process" promised in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments doesn't necessarily need to be a judicial process, and then methodically demolishes it.
This frail and unfortunate effort at Jesuitical casuistry comes just as I'm arriving at peak position in the cycle of Obama fandom, which waxes and wanes for each of us according to factors variously seasonal and unpredictable, not all of which have been successfully identified, but does have something to do with what the President actually does, and the long trajectory across which his plans come to a sometimes surprising fruition.
One thing that has had me gasping with Obama-amazement is his skill in managing the Israel-Iran confrontation without openly hurting anybody's feelings; as Binyamin Netanyahu barks and blusters his way through his Washington engagements, Iran and the Powers decide to resume negotiations, and Iran sends out one of those "signals" by reversing the death sentence against another American "spy", Amir Mirzaei Hekmati.
And then it starts to become clear that the Affordable Care Act, bless its ambivalent heart, is really driving a stake through the heart of the vampire health insurance industry, in that unbearably gradual Obama tempo (in this metaphor, the rules on medical loss ratio would count as daylight, and preventive care without copays is garlic). Denying coverage has been their big engine of profit, and if they can't do it they are going to die, and a semi-public system built out of those exchanges, the nonprofit private insurers, and Medicare is going to rise, almost of its own accord, to take their place.
And then the Justice Department comes up with this stupid argument. Go figure. I can't write the post I wanted to write at all.
