I remember back in the days of George W. Bush how the Left bemoaned the Bush administration’s lack of respect for constitutional rights. Then-Senator Barack Obama even stood on the Senate floor and decried the Bush administration’s
policy of detaining suspected terrorists without charge: “A perfectly innocent individual could be held
and could not rebut the government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence… I can also imagine
the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and
sent to Guantánamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to
prove their innocence.”
But now, President Obama has decided that it is perfectly within reason for the government to assassinate
American citizens without trial, charge or notification! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google
Anwar al-Awlaki. To be fair, though, Obama has had a thorough change of heart: he also signed the National
Defense Authorization Act, which, as the ACLU put its, codifies “indefinite military detainment without
charge or trial into law for the first time in American history.”
Where are the principled liberals now? The ones who denounced Bush for his marring of the Fifth
Amendment? Why do I hear barely a peep when their leader’s Attorney General argues that such
assassinations are legal because “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Your
silence is consent to Obama. Frankly, you are the last line of defense on this one because Hell will freeze
over before the conservatives give up the right to skirt judicial process. In fact, the political Right has, in
an eerily consistent manner, congratulated Obama on disassembling your right to due process. And if you,
like many I’ve talked to, are not worried about Obama killing innocent people, please note that Obama
will not always be president, and he is endowing the next president with that same power.
My point? Stop complaining about Rick Santorum-this and Mitt Romney-that. They don’t care
what liberals think. Instead, start telling your liberal representative that you’re not OK with secret
assassinations (I hope you’re not) because if you wait too long, it will be too late. Here, you truly have
a chance to make a difference because the perpetrator is someone who is electorally bound to listen
to you, his constituents. So get up, and get angry, liberals! That is, unless you, like Obama, believe
that “due process” and “assassination” are synonymous.
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