Droning On

Something miraculous happened last week, the Moron Media and the rest of the Dim-bulb Elite suddenly noticed we have a Drone problem. Amazing, it took almost four year for our “betters” to suddenly notice that the Executive has seized powers that make the whole notion of Limited Government a farce.

Let’s not mince words, our drone policy is an abomination. With these automated killers in the air, our President has taken on the power to eliminated, with extreme prejudice, any man, woman and child who takes a dislike to. Obama has wrapped himself in the cloak of the Red Queen from Alice In Wonderland.

And boy has our Red Queen been busy. Over two hundred Drone strikes have occurred in the last four years. This is a significant increase over the Bush Years where the dry drunk president only managed to get around authorizing just over fifty. Obama has taken the Bush policy on drones and put it on steroids.

Not once has Obama been called to task on this. Not once has he been challenged. Not once has he justified these killing in anything other than boilerplate. Even after blowing up an American citizen, no challenge has been uttered. Anwar al-Aulaqi’s  name has not been mentioned to the general public, not even as a Final Jeopardy question. 

But now our fearless Congresscritters an Media Mavens are on the job and solutions will be offered. What kind of solution? The usual solutions: White Wash and Rubber Stamps. 

The bright idea of our elites is to set up a FISA Court for drone killings. How will that work? It will work exactly as FISA Court did; not at all. As pointed out by other commentators, the FISA Court has not exactly been a high bar to prevent Governmental snooping. It has not been the stout protector of our Forth Amendment rights. Of the 20,000 requests for warrants only six have been denied. 

If we had truly serious Representatives, they would be demanding a full trial in absentia of any Terrorist bad guy the President wanted to blow up. A full trail would be fully public, with a full and robust defense. No conviction would mean the neither killer drones nor Seal Team Six deploying.

But Congress is anything but serious these days, it’s a food fight put on by mental midgets. Democrats refuse to curb their guy because, well, he’s their guy. Because he is Obama, and he is a Democrat we, as a nation can trust him not to abuse the power he claimed for himself and the office. Republicans are not crying foul either because they want the opportunity to go all Dick Cheney when they finally grab the White House.

 Having given up on the duty to declare war sometime after Pearl Harbor, Congrescritters are now gladly handing over the judiciary power to the Executive as well. For the most part they are quite happy to have the President be judge, jury and executioner without all that pesky rule of law stuff getting in the way. 

It’s not really surprising, Congress has steadily withered as an coequal branch of government. Why bother with all that hard effort of upholding the Constitution when you can fob the responsibility off to the executive? That leaves much more time to dial for dollars, raising the funds for ever more expensive reelection bids. It also is a grand way to evade the responsibility of a foreign policy, or any other policy that explodes in unforeseen ways. It’s the “look ma, no hands” mode of governing. 

Still this utterly irresponsible Congress is only a reflection of an utterly irresponsible electorate. Mention Drones to most voters and they might vaguely recall the Droids in “The Phantom Menace.” They might give a passing thumbs up to the whole business as them drones are killing all them evil mooslim terrorist doing evil terrorist things in evil terrorist lands. “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out” done on auto-pilot is the notion.

We won’t get better policy results until the general public, or at least the voting public start to understand why our Constitutional guarantees are more than one more side-show in the great game of Blue vs Red. Letting the president blow up whoever he wants to is a very bad idea, even if he does it in foreign lands. No man should be able to exercise that kind of power, not Bush, not Cheney, not Obama, no one. Fanboi politics is no way to run a nation.