OK, I know I said I’m trying not to spread negativity, but this is just amazing, in a bad way. Once again, Obama is getting away with stuff that Bush and McCain never would have. If McCain had tried to do this, the pushback from the anti-war movement would have been massive. As they say in the piece below, the anti-war movement has been de-fanged by the election of Obama. He has been given carte blanche to do whatever he feels like by both the traditional anti-war folks on the left as well as the press. I find it instructive that a reporter from The Nation broke this story and this segment was on MSNBC, hardly a right wing organization. What is going on? Where is the anger? Where is the outrage? What will it take? Killing of civilians by drones? Secret CIA prisons in Somalia? Assassination orders on US citizens? If these things don’t cause widespread anger what will?
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This drone bombing campaign of countries off stated battlefields began in 2002. The Bush administration bombed Yemen in November of 2002 targeting an alleged Al Qaeda leader. The Obama administration has dramatically increased the drone attacks around the world. In Yemen, we’ve done cruise missile strikes, drone strikes, now we’re hitting regularly in Somalia. On July 6, there were 3 U.S. strikes; June 23rd, another U.S. strike inside of Somalia. A lot of liberals used to say “the world is a battlefield” was the bush doctrine. President Obama hit harder in more countries with special ops forces from the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA than bush did. He has made possible a continuation of these policies that I think McCain would not have been able to push through because there would have been push-back through some semblance of an anti-war movement. There’s no anti-war movement that has any voice in this country anymore. Obama has legitimized and normalized, and attempted to legalize policies a lot of people were saying were immoral and illegal under president Bush.
Why is Obama getting away with this? Why do people not hold him to his campaign promises? His Nobel Peace prize is looking sillier every passing year…