This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut.  There is never a good time to bring things like this up.  Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up?  It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes?   Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals?    The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.   Candidates lie.  Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts.  Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney.   If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it.  If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?  

An excellent question, sir.  You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it.   Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here.  End of story.  

Any other questions, jerk-off?