Obama Boasts He’s Really Good At Killing People
For anyone following since 2009 the incessant Obama administration drone strikes in five or six countries around the world, the following excerpt should come as no shock, except that maybe this president prides himself on killing people:
A new book on the 2012 presidential campaign claims that President Barack Obama told aides that he is “really good at killing people.”
According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Double Down: Game Change 2012, Obama made the comment while discussing drone strikes last year. CNN’s Peter Hamby noted the anecdote in his review of the book for the Washington Post.
There’s probably a slight chance this isn’t true, although for Halperin and Heilemann to state such a thing in their book, you’d imagine they have some proof or multiple witnesses who will corroborate the story. The White House, unsurprisingly, has not commented. Imagine that worm of a press secretary, Jay Carney, wiggling his way through that question.
Was the president trying to be funny? Was it said in seriousness? We’ve seen him and Mitt Romney duke it out on live national television about who would be more willing to kill more people overseas, so we know there’s very little hesitation in the minds of both men to order up a kill strike on a ‘bad guy’ somewhere overseas.
While we must admit the president has certain duties that differ from the average American citizen, and that he harbors more responsibilities and his actions might affect more people than possibly anyone else’s actions in the world, it’s still unsettling to think a man would take pride in killing other humans.
Especially when he knows he’s using other people’s children to do the killing. And, furthermore, innocent civilians get blasted in nearly every Hellfire or Tomahawk cruise missile strike. Grandmas, workers, children, husbands, mothers, etc.
I know of another person of world fame who seems to really relish sending other people to do his killing for him. Publicly, he denies he’s done it, but then he later pounds his boastful breast about his capability to murder.
But this man could never reach the scale of carnage that a Bush or Obama could. This man never had full access to the most extensive array of intercontinental ballistic missiles on earth, or a fleet of drones that respect no nation’s borders or sovereignty.
Here’s this man:
You might think it’s disrespectful to compare such a squeaky clean looking president to an old ‘hippie cult leader’ with an ungovernable beard, but it seems it is exactly the disparity in image that keeps so many Americans complacent about their leaders committing war crimes and atrocities, such as allowing torture or extrajudicial killing, and not being held accountable for the hundreds, thousands, and sometimes (like in Iraq) hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths.
The president has lightheartedly joked about his drone policy before, by claiming he’d nail the now-defunct Jonas Brothers if they made passes at his daughters. While in a twisted universe, that’s funny, it’s hardly appropriate for the man who actually does nail children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia simply because they are in the same area as a possible ‘bad guy’ when US/NATO forces unleash a Hellfire missile attack.
[photo by Chuck Kennedy]
