The very same faction that pretended for years to be so distraught by Bush’s mere eavesdropping on and detention of accused Terrorists without due process is now perfectly content to have their own President kill accused Terrorists without due process, even when those targeted are their fellow citizens.

—Glenn Greenwald, on the Democrats

The ACLU says of this signing,

While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”
[emphasis in original]

These thoughts about the pathetic state of American political discourse, especially on television (but also, in my experience, within my circle of friends, mainly Facebook), were inspired by Glenn Greenwald’s absolutely masterful (as always) tirade against the vast majority of liberals and Obama supporters for their constant hypocrisy and total evasion of any acknowledgment of his failings. The essay is mostly about Ron Paul, whose every interview, appearance, press release, and sound bite do address those civil-liberties and foreign-policy issues and do criticize the supposedly “progressive” Obama for being such an abject failure on every civil-liberties issue in every possible way. Greenwald writes,

But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.
[...]
Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?) or grievance (you’re helping Mitt Romney by talking about this!!). The premise takes hold for a full 18 months — increasing each day in intensity until Election Day — that every discussion of the President’s actions must be driven solely by one’s preference for election outcomes (if you support the President’s re-election, then why criticize him?).

Greenwald wrote this and more to preface his positive thoughts about the candidacy of Ron Paul, who is the only Republican or Democratic presidential candidate to firmly oppose the aggressive foreign policy and civil liberties trampling that Obama has implemented, that every other Republican candidate agrees with or worse, and that liberal Democrats ignore when discussing, thinking about, and voting in elections.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.
[emphasis in original]

Perhaps one of my many failings as a purported political commentator is that I don’t regularly read any liberal blaggers or websites except Greenwald, and him not often enough (which would be every word). Therefore, I can’t judge how few liberal Democrats really acknowledge and criticize all of these heinous actions of Obama’s—one example that I’ve saved is a column by the liberal law professor and staunch civil libertarian Jonathan Turley titled “President Obama has been a disaster for civil liberties” in the mostly liberal Los Angeles Times—but I am mainly frustrated and actually quite a bit disgusted with my hypocritical, smug, liberal, Obama-supporting friends and acquaintances who share links on Facebook about this or that awful thing a Republican(s) has done or said, join in the circle-jerk with the ‘Like’ button and their comments with nary a word of dissent, ridicule Republicans at every opportunity as if they are all a single fetid mass of benighted, hateful, racist, jingoist primitivism that only exists to prevent Democrats from delivering us to Utopia, and never mention a single objectionable thing any Democrat has ever done or said.

Some recent Facebook posts from my friends include a link to the article Speaker Cuts Off C-SPAN Cameras When Dems Attempt To Bring Vote On Payroll Tax Cut with a snarky comment, an admonishment of the United States that if we only paid more taxes, we would have better health care and infrastructure like the country that person is currently visiting, and at least a half-dozen articles about why the envy-based wealth-redistribution politics of the Occupy movement are noble and desirable. None of those people has ever written or linked to a single thing critical of Obama, his regime’s relentless assault on our civil liberties, his regime’s total obsession with secrecy despite promises of transparency, his continuation and escalation of the murder of innocent civilians in Asia, the fact that Obama is obviously bought and paid for by Wall Street banksters as much as any Republican, or any other Democratic failing or hypocrisy. Where are the Facebook posts about SOPA, which Democrats are equally as responsible for as Republicans? Where are the Facebook posts about Obama’s signing of this year’s NDAA with its flagrant disregard for half of the Bill of Rights? Plenty of neutral and left-leaning sites have published articles and columns critical of these bills, and you have seen them! You are part of the problem, you stupid self-blinding morans! You are party to the murders, the imprisonments, the rights violations, the cronyist favoritism, the wealth destruction that the politicians you elected and will re-elect have inflicted and will continue to inflict upon millions of victims!

I try not to judge them for their political beliefs, but it’s hard. They define themselves so much by their total adoration of Obama and the Democratic Party and base so much of their social lives (especially online, which is the only way I currently interact with some of them) on deifying the Democrats and vilifying Republicans that I can’t help but conclude that their systematic bias, their selectively targeted vitriol, and their continuous self-deception are pretty important parts of their character and their personalities. I don’t talk about politics with my friends or write about it anywhere other than here because no one likes trying to parse radical libertarian philosophy that challenges basically every political thought they have ever had and because I don’t like stressful discussions or arguments, especially ones that will alienate me from others who all think alike. It’s true that people who would judge me for my libertarianism are not worth having as friends, but it’s also true that it’s nearly impossible to completely avoid judging others for their politics even though you know their politics rarely say anything bad about their character. Case in point: this very post, in which I judge my friends and colleagues as hypocritical enablers of totalitarian fascism from the anonymity of my blagging chair. I want to keep my friends, and I have made a conscious effort as I’ve gotten older to judge people as people only on the basis of whether they mean well, which my friends all do. This is especially true in discussions/arguments on the internet with anonymous strangers, when courtesy and respect are all too rare.

However, regardless of their intentions, the consequences of their silence about Democratic failings, especially Obama’s, cannot be ignored. There is no better example of the Red-vs.-Blue, with-us-or-against-us, the-right-politicians-will-solve-everything mentality than the average American Democratic voter. Perhaps the average American Republican voter could only equal the loyal Democrat’s ignorance, self-denial, bias, and crippling hypocrisy. What these failings are going to get us are another murderous, oppressive, secretive Obama term, more Democratic legislators who are too morally bankrupt and cowardly to stand up to the neocons for our basic Constitutional rights, and more silence on the uncomfortable truth about the state of American liberalism.

Notwithstanding the reminders from the likes of Noam Chomsky that the FBI (and, I presume, the CIA?) has no proof that Osama bin Laden orchestrated or ordered the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Eric Margolis’s matter-of-fact assertion that “Bin Laden long claimed he had no role in 9/11,” to me it seems extremely, vanishingly unlikely that bin Laden was not a murderer. Many Muslims whose judgment isn’t clouded by all-consuming hatred of the Great Satan recognize that bin Laden killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. In this case, as with presidents and dictators who are accurately called murderers for the deaths they ordered, I call bin Laden a murderer if he never pulled the trigger or pushed the detonator that killed any innocent. Without having analyzed any of the FBI’s, CIA’s, or anyone else’s raw intelligence data or other evidence, from my blagging chair I would put bin Laden’s likelihood of guilt as high as O.J.’s. Besides, he has loudly and proudly claimed responsibility for many non-9/11 murders.

If he is a murderer, then isn’t death a suitable punishment for his crimes? Doesn’t one forfeit his right to life when he maliciously (i.e., not in self-defense) kills innocent people? I think libertarian justice theory is even divided on this issue: some say no one should kill another except in self-defense, some say taking the life of a proven murderer is justified, some say the alleged killer must be convicted in some type of trial according to the legal (or anarchic protection and insurance) system of the victims or their representatives. I’m probably biased by emotion and circumstances, but I tend to think that every relative or friend of anyone killed by bin Laden’s terrorist attacks, which includes people of many nationalities and includes more than the 9/11 attacks, would be justified in seeking retribution in the form of retaliative killing, given that his guilt is proven. Some, including myself, say that his guilt is already proven, so the formality of a trial might not be strictly necessary. A trial would be preferable, though, for several reasons, as follows.

You could say that our Imperial Federal Government was acting as the representative of bin Laden’s thousands of American and non-American victims and exacting their revenge (justice?) for them, given its superior resources. However, I don’t think the State has any more justification to take someone’s life than it has to do anything else, no matter how justified that State’s subjects would be individually and no matter how heinous the crime. (I vehemently oppose the death penalty because the State should definitely not have permission to kill anyone, less so than any of its other activities.) If Chomsky and Margolis are right, then the Imperial Federal Government would not be justified in punishing or seeking justice against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. If most other people are right about 9/11 or at least about the thousands of other people bin Laden has murdered, then those people and their governments would be right in seeking justice or revenge (not the same thing). Therefore, I cannot conclude that it was necessarily right for the State to take bin Laden’s life, but killing a mass murderer per se certainly isn’t the worst thing the Obama regime could have done.

What should it have done, then? All of bin Laden’s victims and their military representatives, if you want to call them that (they don’t represent me, that’s for damn sure), had four options as I see it: do nothing about him, assassinate him, issue drone bombings and missile launches in the hopes that you kill him (and inevitably kill innocents in the process), or capture and try him for his murders. First, what were the legal and practical options the President had?

Professor Jon Silverman discusses and weighs all the legal avenues Obama (and Bush) could have taken regarding bin Laden. I liked that column both because and in spite of the fact that he doesn’t draw any solid conclusions.

This article by Emma Mustich of Salon.com, “Was killing bin Laden legal?”, is a thorough but brief must-read, even to those who recognize that legality rarely has anything to do with right and wrong. But if you’re going to talk about bringing someone to trial, then the realities of law and legality are unavoidable. Mustich writes:

Der Spiegel spoke Tuesday to University of Cologne professor Claus Kress, who questioned the legality of the terrorist leader’s assassination, insisting that justice is “not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial.” According to the Spiegel:

Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him. In the context of international law, military force can be used in the arrest of a suspect, and this may entail gun fire or situations of self-defense that, in the end, leave no other possibility than to kill a highly dangerous and highly suspicious person.

[...]
Elsewehere in the media, James Downie quoted an explanation offered by one of his New Republic colleagues, who does believe the killing of bin Laden was legally justified:

“There are targeted killing issues where the legal background is complicated,” says Brookings fellow (and New Republic contributor) Benjamin Wittes. But, as it turns out, “[t]his isn’t one of them.” One week after the September 11 attacks, Wittes explains, President George W. Bush signed Public Law 107-40, in which Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” No one fit this description more closely than Osama bin Laden. (By contrast, the NATO missile strike in Tripoli that allegedly killed Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al Arab and three of his young grandchildren this past weekend has elicited greater controversy, because the U.N. resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, among many other differences from 107-40, did not include an authorization of force against Qaddafi or his family.)

For their parts, co-founders of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law John Norton Moore and Robert F. Turner have argued that bin Laden’s killing was legal according to the U.N. charter as well as Security Council Resolution 1373, passed within a month of Sept. 11, 2001, which emphasises “the need to combat by all means … threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.” Turner adds: “The targeting of Osama bin Laden is no more an assassination than was the intentional downing in 1943 of a transport aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Killing the enemy during armed conflict is not murder.”

Finally, professor Scott Silliman, who is executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke, told the Christian Science Monitor he has no doubt that bin Laden was “a lawful target”; the CSM also spoke to American University’s Stephen Vladeck, who expressed satisfaction that the U.S. government had “d[one] everything by the book.”

Glenn Greenwald (surprise) exposes the lie that bin Laden was armed or fighting back when he was captured or shot, making the SEALs’ shooting of him definitively non-defensive.

Thus do some scholars consider the targeted killing legally justified because, (a) he’s a murderer and, (b) it’s war, while some reject that conclusion because killing would only be justified in immediate self-defense, even in war.

It is important to remember that, like it or not and agree with it or not, the Imperial Federal Government is at war with Al Qaeda and the jihadists. Many people recognize that as horrible and murderous as the jihadists are, they are waging their war in response to American foreign policy specifically, not wealth or freedom. Even so, it is possible and, I think, useful to consider this war on terrorism and the hunt for bin Laden from the perspective of those fighting the war and those who support it (including the Statist and militarist legalities discussed above). Osama bin Laden did declare war on the “Great Satan” and all that entailed for him (innocents, military, and politicians). Therefore, it is at least possible to understand why military leaders would use any and all means necessary to cripple the threat (short of killing innocents; that is never understandable except as an honest mistake).

Is it a given that in a war, the leaders must not be targeted for death? Churchill and the American leaders did not regret the decision to hold Nazi war criminals on trial (more on that below), but was von Stauffenberg unjustified in attempting to assassinate Hitler? What if some French or British or American or Russian or Polish people helped him do it? (Maybe they did, I don’t know; I can’t stand Tom Cruise.) Would that go against the doctrines of war? Would some Allied soldiers have been wrong in shooting at or bombing Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels or Göring? Why in the world would that have been a bad thing? Was the aforementioned downing of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s airplane wrong? Why is it acceptable in a time of war to kill other soldiers but not target their leaders for assassination? Should French and Polish civilians and soldiers have tried to arrest every Nazi who marched into their countries instead of killing them? No, okay, then why not try to kill military leaders instead of arresting them (and instead of inflicting civilian casualties)? What if, instead of fire-bombing Dresden, the Allied leaders put together a team of Navy SEALs to assassinate only top Nazi military brass? How could that possibly have been a bad thing? Perhaps only the initiator of the murders, an unprovoked, non-defensive murderer, can rightly be retaliated against with killing? Can’t these questions be extended to any war and any war leaders? And make no mistake about it: Osama bin Laden was a war leader, according to himself and just about every government on Earth.

Therefore, attempting to put myself in the shoes of those engaged in this war, I can at least understand the decision to kill instead of arrest. Perhaps, as in any situation, if you are not shooting in immediate self-defense, then shooting is not permissible? Perhaps it is not considered acceptable for leaders to try to assassinate each other, whereas it would be justifiable for individual victims, their families and friends, or conscientious objectors on either side to assassinate a leader believed to be a past and future murderer? If so, then it would be acceptable to assassinate a murderous American president, which it decidedly is not.

I am left to conclude that within the realm of this war and considered from the perspective and interests of those fighting it, targeted assassination is understandable, but from a consistent, objective, self-defensive and not offensive, justice-seeking standpoint, capturing and trying bin Laden would have been preferable. If some stupid American jury or biased international jury found him not guilty, which would be a plainly incorrect decision, only then would I consider it justifiable to go all Dexter on him and bring him to justice where the “law” couldn’t. (Keep in mind that any jury could only find bin Laden not guilty for the purpose of sending the message, “Well, American presidents and generals are more guilty, so I won’t convict him until they have been,” which is irrelevant and immaterial to a murder trial.)

Which brings us to what Glenn Greenwald calls “the Osama bin Laden exception” and the legal and moral implications it entails. As John Cole says,

I’m the hypocrite here. I’m stridently against extrajudicial killings, the death penalty, targeted assassination, etc. I’d wager most of you are, too.

But when I heard that Osama had been killed, I’ll be damned if I didn’t think “Thank God that monster is gone.” Sure, in my ideal world he’d be brought back to the US, tried, and then imprisoned for the rest of his life. But you know what? I can not honestly say I give a damned that he took a double tap to the skull. Sorry. And I’d be also willing to bet that is where most of you all are- this may or may not have been legal, but you don’t give a shit, because that scumbag is at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and got what he deserved.

At an initial, emotional level, it’s hard to disagree. I do feel hypocritical and inconsistent. I feel glad and relieved that he’s dead. I almost wish I didn’t. It’s hard to see anything morally wrong with the retributive killing of a proven murderer per se. But I’m still forced to conclude that any killing not in self-defense should be avoided. Most especially, the State should not be permitted to get away with extralegal, extrajudicial actions of any kind. In this I do see many things morally and practically wrong with the State even having the powers or capabilities to carry out targeted assassinations, not to mention all the other things that any State with such powers will do (is already doing!). This is why I made the disclaimer above that the Obama regime killing bin Laden per se isn’t entirely bad, but many things implied and entailed by that decision and action are very bad.

What does the bin Laden capture-and-kill imply about the Imperial Federal Government’s boundaries (legal and moral) and the leeway it takes with handling justice, whether legal or not and whether towards American citizens or not? Could you imagine needing to quote anyone other than Glenn Greenwald on this issue?

My principal objection to it [the "bin Laden exception"] — aside from the fact that I think those principles shouldn’t be violated because they’re inherently right (which is what makes them principles) — is that there’s no principled way to confine it to bin Laden. If this makes sense for bin Laden, why not for other top accused Al Qaeda leaders? Why shouldn’t the same thing be done to Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen who has been allegedly linked by the Government to far more attacks over the last several years than bin Laden? At Guantanamo sits Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational mastermind of 9/11 — who was, if one believes the allegations, at least as responsible for the attack as bin Laden and about whom there is as little perceived dobut; why shouldn’t we just take him out back today and shoot him in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean rather than trying him?

Once you embrace the bin Laden Exception, how does it stay confined to him? Isn’t it necessarily the case that you’re endorsing the right of the U.S. Government to treat any top-level Terrorists in similar fashion? Again, this isn’t an argument that the bin Laden killing was illegal; it very well may have been legal, depending on the facts. But if we just cheer for this without caring about those facts, isn’t it clear that we’re endorsing a dangerous unfettered power — one that runs afoul of multiple principles which opponents of the Bush/Cheney template have long defended?

For me, the better principles are those established by the Nuremberg Trials, and numerous other war crimes trials accorded some of history’s most gruesome monsters. It should go without saying for all but the most intellectually and morally stunted that none of this has anything to do with sympathy for bin Laden. Just as was true for objections to the torture regime or Guantanamo or CIA black sites, this is about the standards to which we and our Government adhere, who we are as a nation and a people.

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out. Here was the very first paragraph uttered by lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson when he stood up to deliver his Opening Statement:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

And here was the last thing he said:

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have “leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
[all emphasis Greenwald's]

I actually believe in those precepts. And if those principles were good enough for those responsible for Nazi atrocities, they are good enough for the likes of Osama bin Laden. It’s possible they weren’t applicable here; if he couldn’t be safely captured because of his attempted resistence, then capturing him wasn’t a reasonable possibility. But it seems increasingly clear that the objective here was to kill, not capture him, no matter what his conduct was. That, at the very least, raises a whole host of important questions about what we endorse and who we are that deserves serious examination — much more than has been prompted by this celebrated killing.

It’s not a good precedent, and it doesn’t speak highly of the moral character of the leaders who issued the order.

Before concluding with what bin Laden’s death implies for the future, I wanted to revisit the natural emotional responses of John Cole and myself that I touched on above and those of others around the world.

Perhaps my relatively sheltered, comfortable life and my lack of exposure to non-fictional death and violence bias this feeling of mine, but I can’t completely relate to those who say they find nothing (or very little) positive in any human’s death. For example, some commenters at Bob Murphy’s blag, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, Robert Higgs, and surely thousands of others around the interwebs and millions of others around the world find no joy or happiness in the death of even a mass murderer, and that isn’t just people who adored bin Laden and supported his ends and his means. As I said above, I couldn’t describe my reaction as joy or happiness when I first saw the news on TV, but I was definitely glad and relieved. Still positive emotions, but I just didn’t feel strongly about it. Maybe that’s only because our own murderer-in-chief ordered the mission and would receive much praise and credit for it.

One thing I was positively disgusted by and not conflicted at all about was the celebration from Americans that Sunday night. In Washington, D.C., in New York City, at the Mets–Phillies game, which is the main thing I was watching that night. It was pure collectivist, militarist, nationalist jingoism. The first thing that the footage of the impromptu celebrations and chants on Pennsylvania Avenue reminded me of was the audiences at the hangings and beheadings on the TV show The Tudors. They were (depicted as) bloodthirsty, barbaric animals who savored the sight of the king’s justice being done, believing like sheep that anyone the king ordered to death must be an awful sinner who deserved to burn in hell for all eternity. That is exactly what those celebrators and chanters are: bloodthirsty cavemen with iPhones and American flags instead of clubs and loincloths. Seeing that spectacle on TV actually gave me a little satisfaction at the moral high ground I (like to think I) have over the liberal Democrats who claim to be so much more understanding, fair, sympathetic, and certainly not militant or jingoistic. But they are just like the neoconservatives they so despise. Liberal Democratic Obama voters (past and future) probably constituted the majority of the celebrators on Pennsylvania Avenue that night, and my opinion of them is even lower because of it. I hadn’t known it could go any lower.

However, it should be noted that not only in degree but also in kind, there is a difference between Americans celebrating the death of a mass-murderer and Arabs celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. At first glance, the libertarian or other-anarchist or general anti-militarist might say, “Americans cheering bin Laden’s death are cheering from the same perspective and for the same reasons as Arab America-haters cheering the deaths of Americans, because those Arabs see Americans as responsible for the deaths of many of their compatriots just like Americans see Al Qaeda as responsible for the deaths of many Americans.” This viewpoint fails to distinguish between collective responsibility (which in this case does not exist for the American victims) and individual responsibility (which in this case does exist for bin Laden).

Rather, Noam Chomsky’s analogy is p-… p-… perrr-… (I can do it)… perfect (wow, that was hard):

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

Considered from this perspective, it definitely doesn’t make bin Laden’s murder something we should rejoice about or something we should have aimed for specifically; I don’t want George W. Bush or Barack Obama assassinated, especially not by some Iraqi or Afghani paramilitary unit, possibly because I am an American like them and naturally exhibit some nationalistic, tribal solidarity with them, and possibly because that’s an awful, hypocritical, counterproductive goal for the freedom movement. Therefore, if I don’t want one mass-murderer assassinated, I shouldn’t want the other one assassinated. This solidifies my position above that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, the Navy SEALs should have captured bin Laden for trial and execution rather than summarily executing him.

And isn’t it odd how Obama and so many Americans cite this as a testament to national greatness? I thought it was so arrogant for Obama to say that this operation proves that “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” He wasn’t the least bit humble, apologetic for all of that other death and destruction he and Bush have caused in the meantime, or thankful to any other nation except Pakistan (which was probably a token thank-you to mitigate the inevitable cries of “Pakistan obviously isn’t our ally!”). Robert Higgs was as disgusted by this claim of “greatness” as I was:

First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”

The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.

But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart.

Finally, as for the ramifications and the bin Laden–less future we have ahead of us, Laurence Vance, Anthony Gregory, Robert Higgs, Eric Margolis, and Justin Raimondo (and hundreds if not thousands of others whom I haven’t read) have said the cost of 5,000 American lives, a million Iraqi lives, trillions of dollars, and perhaps unrecoverable (in our lifetimes) civil liberties was not worth it to kill one man, however hated and dangerous. As those and others have also noted, bin Laden’s death doesn’t portend the end of anything, really. As Anthony Gregory writes elsewhere,

The smarter liberal media are playing this up as a repudiation of the Bush approach to the war on terror. Yet this only makes sense if Obama himself had actually repudiated that approach. He has instead tripled down in Afghanistan, continued the war in Iraq, multiplied the drone attacks many times over, and continued to treat international law as well as the U.S. Constitution as flexible rules in the waging of war and enforcement of national security. Insofar as Obama is implicitly admitting none of this was necessary to catch Osama, he should be criticized for persisting in it, not hailed as a hero of foreign policy restraint.

Indeed, Obama promises more war: Osama’s “death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad. . . . The cause of securing our country is not complete.”

Glenn Greenwald writes,

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

Those are rhetorical questions. None of those things will happen. If anything, I can much more easily envision the reverse. Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed. Futile decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may temporarily dampen the nationalistic enthusiasm for war, but two shots to the head of Osama bin Laden — and the We are Great and Good proclamations it engenders — can easily rejuvenate that war love. One can already detect the stench of that in how Pakistan is being talked about: did they harbor bin Laden as it seems and, if so, what price should they pay? We’re feeling good and strong about ourselves again — and righteous — and that’s often the fertile ground for more, not less, aggression.

I fear that the combination of this celebration of “greatness” at a military accomplishment and the fact that we will now be living in a permanent national security state without a Public Enemy No. 1 (or much concrete success to show for our ongoing efforts) will only embolden the Imperial Federal Government’s efforts at home and abroad, weaken Americans’ opposition to the national security state, and encourage more encroachments of our civil liberties, because without bin Laden to serve as a cause célèbre, people will just become accustomed to the national security state as a way of life. Maybe no matter what, with or without a cause célèbre, the national security state was doomed to persist and expand.

Speaking of large internet-related companies, Canadian ISPs admitted that their pricing structure (which they call “usage-based billing”) is designed to discourage/reduce internet use by its customers. Cory Doctorow writes, “In other words, they’ve set out to limit the growth of networked based business and new kinds of services, and to prevent Canadians experimentation that enables them to use the Internet to its fullest.” Michael Geist, whom he quotes, says that this pricing model, therefore, is more accurately called behavior-based billing. As a rule, private companies in a free market always strive to attract more customers in order to do more business and make more money, in contrast to government-created “companies” and government agencies, which always seem to be seeking to limit the amount of products or services they have to provide to customers (water, electricity, every office you have to go and wait in line). This indicates that Canadian ISPs are not truly private companies in anything resembling a free market.

Another company that is not close to being entirely “private” and operates in a market that isn’t close to being free is Time Warner. Time Warner supported a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would prevent city governments from introducing fiber-optic broadband infrastructure in their cities. Simple pro-business right-wing conflationists reflexively support a bill that would prevent city governments from doing anything (especially providing a product or service that can and/or should be provided by private companies) and reflexively support the interests of private businesses. They are not entirely wrong, because the ultimate solution is not to get city governments into the fiber-optic broadband business or any other utility. However, the solution that would help the residents of cities where broadband is scarce, expensive, or nonexistent is to remove the regulations that are keeping it that way rather than passing new laws that seem to be mainly aimed at propping up telecom giants. No, I don’t know what laws North Carolina or any other state might have passed restricting competition and expansion in the broadband industry, but, well, look at this bill. It’s a bill that the state legislature will pass that will have profound effects on the telecom industry. It is undoubtedly one bill out of thousands across the country that have set regulations and restrictions on telecommunications, always to the detriment of the average (or, especially, poor) citizen.

Higher education might be the next asset bubble. Well, it’s certainly overpriced, a situation that is entirely the result of government interventions (mainly guaranteed loans to everybody) whose purpose is to make college affordable to more people. All government action has unintended consequences.

This is a great TED talk by Indian scientist Sugata Mitra about how children can teach themselves (and motivate themselves) when given the opportunity (and the necessity) to do so.

Speaking of the problems with traditional, regimented, government education, Boston University Psychology professor Peter Gray writes about the seven sins of our forced-education system. He expands upon a previous post in which he called forced education “prison”. In this post, he also outlines seven reasons compulsory education is harmful to society and not just the children who are currently forced to go to school. Numbers 3 and 4 are “Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance” and “Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.” It’s a really good, brief read.

Sixty-three percent of people killed in the Iraq War have been civilians.

The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

Glenn Greenwald is dismayed at the speed with which the Obama regime’s official reason for sending military aid to Libya changed.

Glenn Greenwald writes another masterful post on America’s two-tiered justice system: one standard of justice for legislators, high-level bureaucrats, and their big-business cronies, and another standard for everyone else. It is not possible to read Glenn Greenwald consistently and objectively and remain an Obama supporter, or possibly even a Democratic Party supporter.

Here are some highlights from Michael Moore’s Twitter feed from March 19 to March 22, 2011:

May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize?

So, what’s wrong with this picture (Libya)? Here’s what:

#1. If the Arab League supports this military action, why haven’t they sent in their Arab troops and planes in real amounts? Uh-huh

#2. Our job is 2 prop up Arab dictators (Saudi, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, etc), not overthrow them & everyone in Arab world knows it

#3. So knock off “it’s our moral obligation 2 defend ppl of Libya.” After Iraq & Afghan & support of dictators, we have no moral standing.

#4. Too little, too late. So NOW we try 2 help the Libyans after Khaddafy has retaken most of country? Really just a big show, isn’t it?

#5. We have neither the troops, stomach, or $$ to fight a ground war for months/years to defeat MK. So can we get back to the NCAA?

[re-tweeting from tomtomorrow] Erased history: Bush’s wars were initially supported by many prominent liberals who bought into the official talking points.

OK. Let’s hear from the “liberals” who say this is a just war because we’re protecting innocent Libyans–like that’s what we do!

Aren’t most revolutions won when the ppl themselves win them? Rare that it works otherwise. U can send them stuff, but it’s their fight.

Coalition-licious! MSNBC reports U.S. carrying out “almost all military operations” http://j.mp/gXOY4I

Final tweet 4 now: All I’m saying is, regrdless where u stand on war or wht party u belong 2, ANY mil action by us,

…because of our past actions, DEMANDS that every patriotic American give the utmost scrutiny 2 ANY call 2 war by our leaders.

This appears to be a civil war in Libya. Not a war of genocide. Not a revolution. One thing’s clear: None of us want Khadaffy to win.

But who is the opposition? Don’t send weapons 2 rebels til u know who they r! Last time we did that we armed bin Laden & the Taliban.

If the rebels want a democracy then support them w/ the arms they need. But u must do same 2 help Bahrain/Yemen or u have no credibility.

But let the Euros do it. Libya is 172mi fr Eurp (closer than Flint is 2 Chicago). The French helped us 230yrs ago & that worked out ok…

…for us. Not so good for Louis XVI. Be careful what u wish for.

We fired over 100 Tomahawk missiles into Libya this weekend @ over $600K-1M a missile. Each missile would pay for 12-20 teachers in US.

CNN reports the usual 70% of my fellow Americans support this air war. Same as Iraq03. Always the same rah-rah % @ the start. Regrets later.

Note to Republicans & Iraq Invasion Supporters: Your attacks on Obama’s war are hypocritical, hollow, & obscene. Your wars have wrecked us.

Libertarians knew Obama wouldn’t be as anti-war and anti-intervention as he characterized himself during the presidential campaign, so I don’t think any of us is surprised at the ease and eagerness with which Obama has intervened violently in a civil war 6,000 miles away, not any more surprised than we were that he has continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and sent 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. We also won’t be surprised when it becomes more costly (money, lives) than the Democrats expect and when their intervention backfires and leads to the propping up of some other dictator or terrorist group or stirs more anti-American sentiment.

Confessions of a Price Controller by Joseph Antos. He explains how Medicare’s price-control system keeps prices up, which is no different from any price controls.

The Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS) is founded on the simple, but incorrect, view that higher payments are justified for services that require greater inputs—ignoring the consumer side of the market.
[...]
Prices must respond to both the supply and demand sides of the market to allocate resources to their best use. Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
[...]
The problem for a government price controller is that he can never know when the price structure is “right.” He can know when physicians are unhappy with their prices because they will complain, but that does not necessarily mean that those prices should be raised. He cannot know when prices are too high, because physicians benefiting from that mistaken generosity will not complain. The bias is always to raise prices, not lower them.

As good, simple, short as that column is, the last sentence struck me as some platitude that was insisted upon by an editor, which might be a good example of why the glorious world of blagging and self-publishing produces more unfiltered honesty and relevant commentary than writing for some corporate publication. Or maybe it’s just because it was published by the American Enterprise Institute. Either way, it was kind of funny and dumb: “Let’s hope a Republican Congress will have the guts to start pulling the needle out of our arms.”

UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First, originally published at cnbc.com. You can’t make this stuff up.

Federal Student Aid To For-Profit Schools Has Tripled In Recent Years, The Consumerist. This is because when the State subsidizes something by taking money from people who earned it and giving it to others, there is no incentive for the prices to go down. In fact, there is incentive for the prices to go up, so they have. In other words, the demand for college in general and the demand for expensive colleges in particular have increased because price is much less of an issue now that the Imperial Federal Government will give you loans to pay for everything. Because the demand is artificially inflated, so are the prices. It is simple.

Obama argues his assassination program is a “state secret” by Glenn Greenwald. I don’t know why everyone who calls himself a “liberal” doesn’t read Glenn Greenwald regularly. I haven’t ever seen a Glenn Greenwald blag post shared by my friends on Facebook. I doubt the implementation of a state assassination program was cited in that one article, shared by at least two of my friends on Facebook, listing all the things Obama has accomplished in his first two years in office with a Democratic Congress. I wonder why they aren’t too proud of that one. I wonder how many have even heard about it.

The Cost of the TARP: One More Time from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Money quote:

Thanks to their access to below market credit in their time of need, courtesy of the taxpayer bailouts, the Wall Street executives are still pocketing tens of millions a year and the banks are again making record profits. Had the market been allowed to work its magic, this wealth and income would have been available for the rest of society. The financial sector will continue to be a drain on the rest of the economy because the government saved it from the consequences of its own recklessness.

Egan’s point is that a large proportion of the Rebublican rank-and-file unquestioningly believe half-truths and blatant lies fed to them by right-wing media. For instance, that Obama is a Muslim, he was born in Kenya, he signed the TARP bailouts into law, and Michelle Obama and 40 friends recently vacationed in Spain on the public’s dime. He’s right, this is pretty alarming. Plenty of voters of all stripes believe things that are wrong, but I’m sure many of them are topics of debate or are not extremely easily disprovable. But to believe things that are objectively, undeniably, obviously wrong, immediately and easily disprovable, is indicative of willful ignorance that should alarm everyone.

But how about the things that liberal Democratic voters never bother to look into or question? For instance, how Obama voted on the aforementioned TARP legislation. (No, Egan didn’t bother mentioning that Obama voted Yea or that he has willfully continued and done nothing to reverse any effects of TARP.) How many Democratic voters know about Obama’s vote on a warrantless wiretapping program or how his regime feels about Bush’s warrantless wiretap policy? (Admittedly, these made bigger headlines than other crimes, failures, and broken promises of Obama’s.) How about the cost of Obama’s failed stimulus vs. the cost of almost 6 years of the Iraq War under President Bush? How about the number of Pakistani non-combatants killed by Predator drone attacks under President Obama in only a year and a half? How many Democratic voters would even be in the ballpark if asked to guess about those numbers? How many liberal blaggers care about the willful ignorance of Democratic voters on these issues? On the other hand, how many gladly avoid railing against Obama for things that, if (when) Republicans did them, they would rant about until they were as blue as Tobias Fünke?

The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

My current concern is the misguided vitriol directed by liberals at Tea Partiers and the former group’s lack of any position to be criticizing anybody’s politics.

Perhaps the rare liberal who visits our little blag will take issue with the loaded language I used in the title: “haters”. My word choice was deliberate and accurate. Most liberals hate the Tea Parties and every single little, last thing that they stand for. Most liberals seem to have nothing but ridicule and scorn for the embarrassing Tea Partiers and their benighted selfishness and racism. Most liberals would not listen to half of what any Tea Partier had to say except to use it as ammunition for their rants about how horrible Tea Partiers have to be to object to all the plans that the liberals have for everyone. I do not say liberals hate Tea Party participants themselves, because I would not put words that personal into other people’s mouths, and most people at least recite the empty, semi-Christian defense “I don’t hate the person, I hate the act.” On the internet, on Facebook, on TV and radio, the sentiment is clear and almost universal: liberals hate the Tea Parties’ ideas and demonstrations the way any group with power hates protestations against and threats to that power.

Consider the most recent Tea Party gatherings, the anti-tax protests on April 15th. Obviously I strongly sympathize with their message on that day and agree wholeheartedly with their goal of reducing taxes. What sentiment therein do liberals find so objectionable? “Leave us alone,” “Stop taking our money,” “Stop spending our money on things we don’t want,” “Stop threatening and imprisoning people for keeping their own money”? These messages, at least, are completely defensive. “Stop doing this, stop doing that, let us govern our own lives.” There is no inherent malice, violence, or any type of aggression behind a defensive message like that, yet liberal Democrats find it worthy of scorn and hatred. Contrast that with the messages almost every Republocrat politician campaigns on: “These are my plans for everyone,” “This is what I will do with your money,” “This is what I will force everyone to do,” “This is what’s good for the whole nation.” Please don’t pretend the plans and promises of politicians require no coercion and carry no threats of punishment for non-compliance, and please don’t try to twist anti-tax protests into something the slightest bit coercive. Leave such bald dishonesty for the politicians.

While it’s true that I’m probably inserting my own ideas of what I would be protesting at an anti-tax (or other anti-government) rally and not considering the full scope of what various neocons and other dupes have said at other rallies over the past year (for example, here is an issue I agree with liberals on and that does, in fact, make Tea Partiers an embarrassment), I’d wager that the whole of the Tea Parties’ message is no more violent than the ideas of their detractors.

I came across a column about the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party in my very own town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was written by a liberal named Rick Keith who made some good points and several bad ones. He attended the April 15th Tea Party on the University of Michigan’s campus and reported on the hypocrisy he saw in the Tea Partiers. The worst part, which could have been turned into quite a humorous column, was that Rick Keith pretended to give half a flying fuck about the United States Constitution. Being much more of an adherent to Lysander Spooner’s position on the Constitution than to the strict Constitutionalism of someone like Ron Paul (whom I still openly supported in 2008 and would support again in 2012), I would not be too interested in defending the Constitution too vigorously. Keith’s purpose in arguing Constitutional points with the Tea Partiers was not, I imagine, to convince them that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are defending the Constitution much better than the Tea Partiers’ ideal politician, nor to convince them that he loves the Constitution more than they; rather, he was trying to expose their hypocrisy by showing them that many of the things they want and the things they benefit from are unconstitutional. I don’t imagine he was successful, especially at that anti-tax rally, as there was no income tax in the original Constitution and the central government functioned just fine for 125 years without one (excepting Lincoln’s war taxes).

He is well informed but misinterprets many things with typical liberal-Democrat bias, so I’ll give a brief summary of the lukewarm attacks he managed to make on the hypocrisy of the Tea Partiers and assume he speaks for most liberals:

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance, for some reason, and Keith probed the speaker to tell the socialist, Statolatrist history of the Pledge. He got no response. That’s a good point, and I commend him for knowing his history and speaking up about it.

A doctoral student spoke out against government spending and praised private enterprise, even though though the student engages in federally funded cancer research in federally funded buildings at a federally funded university.

Some local conservative talk-radio host confused the TARP bank-bailout program with Obama’s stimulus spending package. This conservative “didn’t mention the Stimulus’s $140 billion tax cuts to the ‘We’re Taxed to Death’ audience, nor the hundreds of billions to create jobs in rebuilding a crumbling infrastructure, increase efficiency and advance new technologies.”

Needless to say, Keith disagrees with the Tea Partiers’ preferences about what they would like to do with their own money, and he points out that Exxon paid no income taxes to the Imperial Federal Government last year by funneling taxes through offshore subsidiaries. See, Exxon’s taxes are relevant because in the liberal Democrat’s mind, if one company weasels out of its taxes, that means all companies are rolling in profit and no one is being overtaxed, so the Tea Partiers’ complaints about being “taxed to death” are hypocritical and based entirely in fiction!

The Tea Partiers’ idol, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes and simultaneously over-spent, and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush bailed out banks and created soaring debt, all of which these Tea Partiers supported or would have supported.

The Tea Partiers are also apparently hypocritical because the federal government subsidizes all kinds of industries but the Tea Partiers don’t want this to extend (further) into health care. According to Keith, federal government subsidies = subsidies that the Tea Partiers support, so suddenly opposing Obamacare makes them hypocritical?…

Either way, I’m sure there are inconsistencies in there, and I’m equally as sure that Keith’s exposure of them involved a little bit of reaching and no small amount of hypocrisy of his own. Luckily for me, I am not hampered by any association with conservatism, support of any political party, attendance at any Tea Party rallies, or misunderstanding of history, economics, or political philosophy, so I can tear into Rick Keith’s pathetic delusion of American politics at will:

Rick Keith, by your assistance in putting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in power, you are an accomplice to murder like every other Democratic- and Republican-voting American in the last century. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Africans, Arabs, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Americans is on your hands. All of you. Every president you have supported is a war criminal who belongs in prison next to the ones you’ve hated, and you are an accomplice to their crimes.

The Clinton-led NATO bombings of Yugoslavia/Serbia were unconstitutional and murderous, as are Barack Obama’s continuing airstrikes on Pakistan. The Drug War and the very existence of the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional as well. While it is legitimate to bring up the Tea Partiers’ inconsistencies in their support of strict Constitutionalism solely to point out their errors, even if you don’t support strict Constitutionalism yourself, the politicians you so idolize do swear to uphold the Constitution and are bound by the laws of their office, so by their own rules, they are criminals. Very few of the trillions of dollars your president and your Congress have spent have any remote justification in the Constitution, anywhere.

The boring, lame argument that people who receive or benefit from government money are hypocritical to oppose government spending is simply lazy. It is not possible to avoid government-provided products or services, but we can still point out the injustice of funding them coercively and promote their more efficient provision by companies and communities, privately and voluntarily. It might surprise you to learn that that cancer research student is not solely responsible for the state of public and private education and does not control the sources of funding that pay for biomedical research in this country today. On the contrary, it is your fault that no one can do privately funded research or get a privately funded education in the sciences.

Obama’s stimulus plan will have proven to create mostly government jobs and government debt, exactly as Herbert Hoover and FDR did. If you really wanted to improve the economy and unemployment in the long run, you would have supported tax cuts and spending cuts, so that people can spend their money as they see fit and not as politicians see fit.

You fail to mention that Barack Obama voted for the TARP bailouts, making him a contributor to that inflationary, impoverishing debacle. Conservatives are hypocritical (or at least dumb) for supporting Reagan’s cut-and-spend policies, debts, and bailouts, so all of the present-day liberals are, too, for calling out the Tea Partiers on it while simultaneously supporting the exact same things when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Ben Bernanke do them.

Rick Keith’s and every other liberal’s idolization of Bill Clinton, saying he brought us “prosperity (with tax increases), based on emerging technologies, a new infrastructure and the Information Age,” belies a strong bias, something that will probably, unfortunately, survive through Obama’s deficits and unemployment. Your misunderstanding of economics is not surprising, so let me tell you a little something about the business cycle and the federal reserve. The “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, because much of that growth you liberals love to extol was fueled by debt enabled by the federal reserve, which came back to hurt the economy when the tech and dot-com bubbles burst. Inflation enriches people in the finance industry temporarily and impoverishes everyone in the long run, and that’s what we’ve been seeing throughout the existence of the federal reserve, including during the Clinton administration. Government spending can only be wasteful in the long run because those expenditures are not subject to the price system or the profit and loss of the free market, so that spending and investment that made us so rich in the 1990′s is one of the hundreds of things that made us poorer now. I repeat: the “good times” of the 1990′s weren’t so good, just like the “good times” of the housing bubble weren’t so good.

Lastly, we come to Obamacare, liberals’ standard for all that is great about the Savior of America and Congress’s wise spending under the guidance of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. This is disgusting power grabbing and vote buying at its worst. “Debacle” will not begin to describe this when my children are grown up. “Debt” will scarcely mean anything anymore when the printing presses inflate the money supply constantly to give stuff away for free when all the Baby Boomers and unemployed stiffs don’t have to pay for anything and health care providers don’t have to make any economic decisions. Medical charity, which used to provide for the indigent, has already all but disappeared and will, in fact, be outlawed. The price competition that improves quality, increases number, and decreases price will also be outlawed. In his column, Rick Keith accuses conservative Tea Partiers of working to “tear down excellence” by “elevating mediocrity.” The more government controls medical care, the more this becomes true: equality is increased by bringing everybody down to a common level. Outlawing economic calculation on the free market absolutely cannot and will not make anything better or cheaper for the masses. (Not that the market hasn’t already been screwed up by decades of government interference.)

The Tea Parties have been infiltrated by neocons, anti-immigration flag waivers, bland supporters of a little less government but only domestically, and straight anti-Democrat simpletons because those are the types of people who predominate in the non-Democrat American populace. Similarly, the April 15th anti-tax Tea Party rallies were so strongly ridiculed because the type of people who predominate in the Democratic ranks are blind Statolatrists who oppose any and all governmental cuts (non-military, of course) and despise the idea of people keeping more of their own money that should be the government’s. If this were inaccurate, then liberal Democrats would have something nice to say about the anti-tax protests and would have opposed some of Barack Obama’s and Congress’s spending/stimulus/bailout actions. But they haven’t, and they won’t, because they are blind followers of just about anyone with a (D) after their name, especially when those Democrats propose to take more money from people who earned it and give it to others.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy should earn him the ire of self-described peaceful or anti-war liberals across the world, but all of the American liberals (at least, the supporters of the Democratic Party) love him and continue to defend him. Obama has continued the aggressive war, started by George W. Bush, in foreign countries that have not declared war on the United States. Civilians continue to be killed, retaliatory terrorism continues to kill many more, and young foreigners continue to become attracted to the terroristic, America-hating ideology that Obama and everyone else in Washington claim to be striving to quell. Libertarians predicted this would happen and routinely criticized Obama, Democratic politicians, Democratic voters, and the neocons for their imminent hypocrisy and warmongering, and we have been proven correct and justified in those attacks.

On January 23, 2009, Obama ordered air strikes against Pakistan by Predator drones, killing approximately 15 non-aggressing civilians, including 3 children in a country that had not attacked or declared war on the United States. This began Obama’s continuation of the bloody air-strike campaign carried out by CIA-operated drones (Predator aircraft) in Pakistan that was ramped up in September 2008 and continues unabated to this day. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reports that 708 innocents (non-combatants) were killed by drone air strikes in 2009:

Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.

You can find a list of CIA drone air strikes carried out in Pakistan in the Wikipedia article Drone attacks in Pakistan. I was going to list them all to emphasize how bloody and counterproductive Obama’s foreign policy has been, but, as you will note if you read the news articles cited therein, those articles rarely contain details or even estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by the drone attacks. Whatever the reasons, sinister or not, the important point is that these civilian deaths are not highlighted by the media, are not stressed to the public by CIA, Defense, or White House officials, and are apparently not much concern to most Americans. Least of all the liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, continue to defend him to this day, and therefore have the blood of innocent Pakistanis and Afghanis on their hands.

They are of concern to Pakistanis, Afghanis, and terrorists and civilians across the Middle East. There is much evidence that drone attacks are counterproductive regardless of how many terrorists they kill and of the support they might receive from Pakistani and Afghani officials. For instance, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani has said, “These (strikes) are counterproductive and not in the interests of the country. I think the Obama administration will have to reconsider this policy.”

Afghanistan is, of course, more deadly for both U.S. soldiers and local civilians. This U.N. report (pdf) says that approximately 310 (one-third) of the civilian casualties that resulted from combat in Afghanistan in the first half of 2009 were caused by international military forces, which means U.S.-led forces. It is probably easier to just read the Wikipedia article. (Hey, it’s the best source for a summary of this information.) The U.N. report also concludes that civilian deaths and injuries are probably significantly under-reported because of the lack of ability to confirm many of them.

True to his promises to expand and focus the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, Obama sent 30,000 more soldiers there in December. This is another example of counterproductive warmongering that will only continue to inspire hatred, kill innocent people, and waste billions of dollars that could be spent improving our own country, something the military cannot do. He says this is a precursor to the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 18 months (say, July 2011), so while we’re on the topic, I’ll predict that a significant withdrawal will not begin on schedule, and after it does happen and Afghanistan is controlled by its own people, the war in Afghanistan will be shown to be largely a futile effort.

The most embarrassing part of this presidency so far was Obama’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, which he should have rejected. That speech consisted mostly of a promotion of military force as a vehicle of peace and a justification of the aggressive interventions of the Imperial Federal Government. Chris Floyd covered it sufficiently.

Obama’s legacy will probably be written in terms of his economic policy, which has been abominable. The idiotically named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was his huge $787-billion stimulus bill that aimed to increase consumer spending and lending when they both needed to be curtailed like never before. Reckless borrowing (debt), which fueled unwise consumer and commercial spending and industrial expansion into unsustainable projects, is exactly what caused so many people to default on their mortgages and credit cards, so many companies to go out of business, and such a high rate of unemployment. Obama’s myopic stimulus plan operated under the Keynesian assumption that the economy is static and circular, and that more consumer spending means more economic growth, and has only delayed a true recovery.

In the second-biggest economic fiasco to date (after the trillions of dollars given to undeserving, failing automotive and financial corporations), the Cash for Clunkers program was an economic failure to anyone who paid attention. Part of the problem is that the defined goals of the Cash for Clunkers program were harmful to the American economy, so by succeeding in promoting spending, raising prices, and destroying wealth (literally), the program failed horrendously.

As alluded to above, Obama’s Treasury and Federal Reserve have committed or printed a total of $11 trillion to forestall the Second Great Depression. This number is not mentioned frequently, and the individual sources or components of this total are hardly ever highlighted or discussed, even right after the funds are printed by the Treasury and given to the companies. It is possible that they actually believe printing money out of thin air and keeping failing, inefficient, unproductive, parasitic companies afloat will promote an economic recovery and economic strength in the foreseeable future. If Obama, his economic advisers, and the people in the Treasury Department and Fed believe that, then their ignorance of the basic principles of economics and even of common sense are astounding—Krugmanian, even. If they don’t believe it, which is a distinct possibility, then they are intentionally exacerbating the economic crash in order to buy some time, possibly in the hopes that another Democratic government can be elected in 2012. How ignorant and/or short-sighted. Bloomberg reported that the bailout and stimulus funds approach the total GDP of the United States.

Being too stupid and caught up in his own messiah complex to learn from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, His Eloquence is hell-bent on pumping up bubbles in the automotive industry and “green” technologies as fast as he can. It is unlikely the automotive bubble will ever pop because American car companies are well on their way to becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government, which will not be subject to the pressures of the free market, such as it is (though they will, as everything governmental and private is, still be governed by the laws of economics and human action, meaning they will only impoverish dollar holders more). This month, Obama announced that $2.3 billion of his $787-billion stimulus package will be rewarded for clean-energy technologies in the form of tax credits. These will go to 183 companies in 43 states. This is one of a million examples of the government interfering in the economy by taking money from people who earned it (taxpayers) or simply printing it (impoverishing all dollar holders) and giving it to people or companies for political reasons, to achieve goals defined by politicians and bureaucrats. This is not how a free society functions. This is not how a man of the people treats his people’s money.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama is terrible on issues of civil liberties, and this was even obvious during the campaign, when he voted to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that spied on users.

Glenn Greenwald and the New York Times article he cites sum up Obama’s hypocritical and not-so-stellar civil-liberties record quite well.

The Obama regime’s Department of Justice [sic] sided with that of George W. Bush regarding the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and anyone else the State deems an “enemy combatant.” The D.C. Circuit Court had issued a ruling agreeing with the Bush DOJ that prisoners being held in American prisons outside of American soil did not count as legal “persons” and that they have no Constitutional protections against torture, and Obama’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal of that case, meaning they support the ruling.

They also decided to revamp, rather than reject, the system of military tribunals established by the Bush regime.

On October 28, 2009, Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, under the bizarre impression that hate crimes legislation protects people’s civil liberties. Oh, but the Democrats assure us the First Amendment–protection clauses in the bill will protect all of our Constitutional rights. People convicted of “hate crimes” will still be punished for their thoughts, and certain victim groups will be treated differently under the law than other victims of the same crimes, so, you know—civil liberties, Orwellian police state, it’s all the same to the Democrats.

Kinsella argues that Obama is actually worse than Bush on intellectual property.

A major indicator of Barack Obama’s ineptitude and corruption is the people he has chosen to surround himself with.

Most of my Democratic friends not only supported but lauded the selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate. Presumably this was because it improved the chances of the Savior of America being elected president and was certainly not an indication of deep-seated, in fact fundamental, hypocrisy and amorality among liberal Americans. Joe Biden is a fantastic warmonger who voted to invade Iraq in 1998 and has been described as “perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration’s decision to invade” Iraq. He is a staunch opponent of civil liberties as well. Biden voted for the original PATRIOT Act, voted to reauthorize (!) the PATRIOT Act in 2006, and in fact bragged about having authored a predecessor to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and another sweeping terrorism bill the year before that. This moran also supports a federal ban on smoking. Biden has a long, dirty history of supporting the Recording Industry Association of America and the FBI’s privacy-invading endeavors. He is also an ardent drug warrior who was instrumental in creating the National Office of Drug Control Policy and boasts about coining the term “Drug Czar”. Joe Biden is truly a despicable human being.

Among Obama’s cronies, Biden might only be surpassed by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is a creepy, slimy, vindictive, malicious politician of the worst sort. He seeks the political destruction even of fellow Democrats who have crossed him in the past, he believes the State can abrogate anyone’s right to bear arms at any time for whatever reasons it pleases, and of course he was involved in former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play schemes.

It was expected that Obama’s nominees for Secretary of Commerce would know nothing about business and less about economics, but it was a true sign of his ineptitude that he would nominate two who were ethically challenged hypocrites who actually, literally belong in prison under current state and federal law. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination because he was under investigation by a grand jury for influence-peddling, meaning his political donors had received state contracts. The charges were eventually dropped, but, as you should know by now, that doesn’t mean he was innocent. (Judd Gregg, the second nominee, withdrew his nomination because of irreconcilable differences with Obama, and was a bad choice for Obama anyway because Gregg had actually voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in 1995, which makes him a great candidate from my perspective but underscores the ineptitude of Obama’s team.) The third and final nominee was Gary Locke, a money-laundering tax evader who repeated the crimes of the Clinton Chinese fundraising scandal and played the race card when he was scrutinized. This apparently made him a perfect fit for Obama’s cabinet. I’ll link to Michelle Malkin for the first time, only because she covered Locke when he was Governor of Washington and she worked for the Seattle Times.

Obama’s choices for Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chairman have also proven to be terrible. This should be self-explanatory. Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke have been the primary implementers of the corporate-State socialist doctrine that large investment banks (particularly Goldman Sachs) and the American automotive companies are too big to fail, must be bailed out with stolen (printed) taxpayer money at every turn, and will ultimately better serve Geithner’s and Bernanke’s ideal way of life by becoming de facto arms of the Imperial Federal Government. They desperately cling to the Keynesian fantasy that spending = economic growth, when Americans need to save and invest, not borrow and consume. This policy will only end as Mises and Hayek predicted: with crippling inflation and more government intrusion into the economy to fix the problems it created.

It is hard to imagine how Obama could have done better at surpassing George W. Bush in the stupidity and ignorance of his selections and nominations to fill various governmental posts, but history might show that he succeeded.

His Eloquence signed two bills requiring increased energy efficiency, following the all-encompassing Statist mantra of “if you want something, regardless of whether it is desired by the people it affects, simply mandate it,” during the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

The Savior of America also appears bound and determined to inflict cruel, crippling environmental and medical-insurance policies on the United States, as evidenced by his constant fear-mongering, his blatant patronizing, his demagoguery, his terrifying speech at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, and the passage of the politicized and ill-advised health care bill. However, the Green USA and Obamacare are not realities yet, so I’ll have to save those for next year (probably).