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Death From The Sky
Feb. 7th, 2013 12:51 pmOccasionally, somebody else says something to which my only response is "that's just what I would have said." From here, today brings one of those cases. The topic is targeted drone strikes overseas against US citizens.
*** quote ***
That's it exactly. This kind of stuff [drone strikes on US citizens overseas] deserves the strictest level of scrutiny from an involved citizenry because it's the very definition of the banana peel on the top of the slippery slope.
You pull some guy's charred AK-clutchin' remains out of some smoking van wreckage filled with Taliban corpses in the Hindu Kush somewhere, and I'm not going to shed any tears if you find a blackened passport with a blue cover in his pocket; I wouldn't expect Patton's Third Army to stop the drive on Bastogne and call out the lawyers if one of the Jerries in front of them yelled "Hey, Mac, I'm an American!" either.
Too far down this path, however, and I could win the argument in this thread by calling 1-800-RAT-FINK and tell them I had some rock-solid information that [Other Poster] was a... what was the term he used? a "radical Islamist"? ...and I'd win the thread by default, since he wouldn't be able to respond due to the JDAM through his roof.
If all it takes to sign a death warrant for somebody is to hang a label on them, you want to be very careful about how hard you make it to hang that label.
In the long run, itmay well will almost certainly turn out that letting the occasional terrorist set off a bomb or hijack a plane would have done far less damage to the fabric of the Republic than we've done in trying to stop them.
*** end quote *** (emphasis mine)
The part in italics I emphasize because that's by far the hardest thing to get an elected official (any elected official) to say. In nearly any political environment, any politician who says that will be hounded by the opposition, unless we the people say otherwise.
Thus endeth the lesson.
*** quote ***
That's it exactly. This kind of stuff [drone strikes on US citizens overseas] deserves the strictest level of scrutiny from an involved citizenry because it's the very definition of the banana peel on the top of the slippery slope.
You pull some guy's charred AK-clutchin' remains out of some smoking van wreckage filled with Taliban corpses in the Hindu Kush somewhere, and I'm not going to shed any tears if you find a blackened passport with a blue cover in his pocket; I wouldn't expect Patton's Third Army to stop the drive on Bastogne and call out the lawyers if one of the Jerries in front of them yelled "Hey, Mac, I'm an American!" either.
Too far down this path, however, and I could win the argument in this thread by calling 1-800-RAT-FINK and tell them I had some rock-solid information that [Other Poster] was a... what was the term he used? a "radical Islamist"? ...and I'd win the thread by default, since he wouldn't be able to respond due to the JDAM through his roof.
If all it takes to sign a death warrant for somebody is to hang a label on them, you want to be very careful about how hard you make it to hang that label.
In the long run, it
*** end quote *** (emphasis mine)
The part in italics I emphasize because that's by far the hardest thing to get an elected official (any elected official) to say. In nearly any political environment, any politician who says that will be hounded by the opposition, unless we the people say otherwise.
Thus endeth the lesson.
