Two quick things

1) I have the horrible feeling that now that "JOBS JOBS JOBS" is our new political mantra, everyone is going to forget the whole "decent-paying" part of the equation. I'm sure the GOP will suggest such marvelous job-creation strategies as eliminating the minimum wage and creating more shit-level service jobs a la McDonald's and Wal-Mart. Which won't pay enough to live on, much less allow for extra money for spending, which will defeat the whole point. Just having a job is not good enough, guys, unless you're just looking to increase the ranks of the working poor.

2) Fun game - read any MSM article about the death of Anwar al-Awlaki and count up the number of the following, or similar, phrases: "alleged", "connected with", "suspected", "U.S. officials say", "according to U.S. officials", "played a role", "the U.S. believes". Which, evidently, totes up to more than enough justification to kill someone, I guess.

Look, he said hateful things about his own country and our government. Ignoring the fact that you could say the same for some Teabaggers and some members of the GOP, that's not reason enough to kill someone. That's not how it works. You capture the guy, bring him to a court, lay out your legal case against him and prove that he's worthy of punishment. (Not that I support the death penalty, but we won't go into that right now.)

We gave Saddam Hussein a trial.
We gave Tim McVeigh a trial.
We gave Ted Bundy a trial.
We gave Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer) a trial.
We gave John Wayne Gacy a trial.
We gave ED GEIN a trial.
We goddamn gave The Manson Family a trial.
We gave the FUCKING NAZIS A TRIAL.

Yet this guy was just too goddamn obviously guilty and evil to even bother with FORMAL ACCUSATIONS, much less something as wussy and liberal-socialist as a trial.

When the goddamn Mossad found fucking Adolf Eichmann hiding out in Argentina, the man who was in charge of the trains that carried victims to the camps for "relocation" via Zyklon-B, did they shoot him in the head and dump his body on the way back, or drop a bomb on him? No, they grabbed his sorry Fascist ass and dragged him back to Israel... FOR A TRIAL.

How evil was Eichmann? Well, for one, he kept on killing Jews even after GODDAMN HEINRICH HIMMLER told him to stop:

By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered Jewish extermination to be halted and evidence of the Final Solution to be destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued his work in Hungary against official orders.

And yet he still got treated more fairly and with a higher sense of morals than al-Awlaki did.

No, I'm fucking not going to be happy about this.

(BTW, let me link to this old post; it seems we have, indeed, become those vigilante assholes who Must Do Something regardless of morality or humanity, just like the "ghosts" in the book.

The team had given up a long time ago on the niceties of conflict. Rules of war, Geneva Convention - all that crap. They moved in a new world, a place where things happened as fast as the bings and bangs of the Internet or the speed at which a picture could be flashed around the world. [. . .] They didn't have time for long-drawn-out investigations, or trying to explain themselves, or committees being formed. . .

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