The New Normal

If you read this report by the ACLU summarizing the Obama administration's stance on a variety of civil liberties issues during their first 18 month's in office - and I hope you will - pay attention to how far we've drifted as a nation in 10 short years. It is quite remarkable how the effects of an "endless war" paradigm can utterly destroy a popluation's alligence to the most basic pillars of liberal democracy. Impunity for government officials for even the most egregious law breaking, including torture and murder, illegal spying, the abandonment of due process (for some - at least for now). As the report suggests, all of this is the "New Normal."

Even more remarkable (to me) is that scores of people who (rightly) denounced President Bush for his lawless conduct gleefully accept and defend equally lawless conduct from President Obama. The Obama administration claims it has the legal authority to kill American citizens who are not fighting on any recognized battlefield. It claims that the exexecutive branch of our government has the legal authority to kill American citizens without any due process, based on its sole and unreviewable determination that the target is involved in terrorism.

I'm guessing that this authority, in their minds, is limited to American citizens living abroad - perhaps in the Middle East. I wonder, in the words of Thomas Payne, how soon that authority will migrate to other places.

Is there is any moral line we won't ultimately cross to "keep America safe?"

Tell me that terrorism doesn't work. Land of the free and home of the brave? Yeah right.

Joe H.