Am I seeing a pattern here?

Is it just me, or does death seem to always be hovering around the Obama Administration?

• Attacks by US military drone aircraft have dramatically increased, leading to the likely deaths of dozens of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan — even though the Administration officially claims zero civilian casualties
• Operation Fast and Furious deliberately placed automatic weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, leading to the deaths of at least one American law enforcement official, and at a minimum, 200 Mexicans
• Osama bin Laden: executed without a trial; Obama Administration and Democratic party officials ecstatic
• Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen, killed in a drone attack
• In the wake of Awlaki’s death, a secret White House legal memo was revealed, which argued that the US government could legally assassinate (that is, kill without the victim knowing he was under attack or having the opportunity to defend himself) a wanted US citizen if capturing him alive was not feasible
• 100 US Special Forces troops are headed to Uganda and surrounding areas to organize military offensives against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army
• Muammar Gaddafi – reportedly captured alive by US-backed “rebels,” then lynched without a trial; Obama Administration and Democratic party officials ecstatic
• Vice President Biden described the US intervention in Libya (presumably including Gaddafi’s lynching) as a “prescription” for the future of the Middle East

I think it’s pretty safe to say that after all of this, the virtual absence of anti-military/anti-war/anti-US protesters has pretty much delegitimized everything the “anti-war” movement stood for during the Bush presidency.  Maybe it’s a case of “only Nixon could go to China”; that is, only an African-American Nobel laureate messiah figure could get away with policies that involve the aggressive use of military force and the killing of so many foreign civilians — most of whom, it should be noted, have much darker skin than the mostly lily-white members of the Obama Administration.  I suppose progressives no longer consider light-on-dark oppression to be a crime against humanity, now that one of their own is sitting in the White House.

None of this should be surprising.  The twentieth century saw the creation of the most barbarian societies in human history, all in the name of “equality.”  And the same kinds of things happen on a local scale as well.  In a recent news story about “Occupy Oakland” devolving into a series of thuggish vigilante episodes when conflicts erupted between the protesters, an Oakland police supervisor quipped, “It’s interesting for a group that claims to be against current civilization and rules to set up a far more oppressive society than our own.”

Of course President Obama doesn’t really have to worry about raising the ire of the professional progressive protesters.  After all, it’s largely the former “anti-war” crowd that is busy “Occupying” our cities these days, and their overseers can always keep them agitated over something that is supposedly the fault of Republicans.  Still, this is a curious legacy for a man who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize.  How ironic is it that only a few short years ago, liberals reeled at suggestions that George W. Bush be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after toppling the Taliban and ousting Saddam Hussein.

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Posted by Michael Laprarie on October 21, 2011.
Filed under Arab Spring, Barack Obama, Global Politics, Libya, Military.
Tagged with: Barack Obama • Gaddafi • Special Forces.


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