The Open Fields

The Times is troubled that the President is killing people . . . "without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle." One of the great moral imponderables is supposedly, like, How Do Good People Do Evil Things? But really it's fairly obvious:

A unilateral campaign of death is untenable. To provide real assurance, President Obama should publish clear guidelines for targeting to be carried out by nonpoliticians, making assassination truly a last resort, and allow an outside court to review the evidence before placing Americans on a kill list. And it should release the legal briefs upon which the targeted killing was based. 

 Publish clear guidelines! That's your answer for everything! Sleep well, America; don't worry world. Our Kill Lists have the best warranty in the industry. 10 years, parts and maintenance! No deductible! Built to last!

Tools and Dies

In any other age -- including the last administration -- this story would have been presented as a scandalous exposé. The genuinely creepy scenes of the "nominating process" alone would have been seen as horrific revelations. Imagine the revulsion at the sight of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld sifting through PowerPoint slides on "suspected terrorists" all over the world, and giving their Neronic thumbs up or down as each swarthy face pops up on a screen in front of them. Imagine the tidal wave of moral outrage from the "Netroots Nation" and other progressive champions directed at Bush not only for operating a death squad (which he did), but then trotting out Condi and Colin and Bob Gates to brag about it openly, and to paint Bush as some kind of moral avatar for the careful consideration and philosophical rigor he applied to blowing human beings to bits in sneak attacks on faraway villages.

But the NYT piece is billed as just another "process story" about an interesting aspect of Obama's presidency, part of an election-year series assessing his record.

-Chris Floyd

The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.

The Democrats' role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don't resist the rightward movement -- they let it happen -- but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.

-Stop Me Before I Vote Again, zee livruh

I think we all accept by now that America's parties aren't competing factions at all but rather complementary parts of a single machine, and it's oddly impressive to watch it operate at peak efficiency.  If you've ever had the chance to see an industrial slaughterhouse in action, you'll know what I mean--the awesome speed and mechanized balleticism with which formerly living things are reduced to their constituent parts.  MBA-land lingo would say something like: Republicans create the practice; Democrats develop the process.

As we head into another election season--is it right to call it a season when it only occurs every couple of years? isn't it more like, uh, el Nino? a climatological phenomenon of sorts?--this is worth bearing ever in mind.  Voting for a president is like voting for the weather.  If it happens to rain on the day you selected, you may believe that your choice has been affirmed; if not, well, there is always next time.

The Replacements

Hello.  We don’t know who the fuck you are.

Presumably you’ve done some nasty shit.

We’re here to guarantee you pay for it.

We’re gonna kill you in your fucking car.

You’ve done it now; you’ve really gone too far.

Your demographics are a perfect fit.

Google terrorist: you’re the first hit.

We’ll drone your ass and then we’ll hit the bar.

Oh, um, we also got your kids and wife,

your goats, your fields, your buddy who stopped by

to catch a lift on market day; though we

regret all unintended loss of life,

we knew that one of you was number three,

or near enough to number three to die.