Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

“How dare he do the job of killin’ terrorists better than we did?!”

Poor President Obama. There’s just no way he can ever do it right and please the Republicans, is there? Either he’s too soft on terrorists, what with all those sissy little “civilian trials” and “criminal rights” and “abiding by the freakin’ Constitution”, or he’s too tough when he starts eliminating them too rapidly.

Just how unpopular are President Barack Obama's anti-terrorism policies with his Republican critics? Even when he's killing terrorists they find flaws.

At a panel on national security policy at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, a prominent lawyer from the Bush administration's Department of Justice said he was concerned that the higher number of terrorist executions taking place under Obama was compromising U.S. intelligence operations.

"Why have executions increased?" asked Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act. Citing a recent Washington Post article on the increased targeted killing of terrorists, Dinh complained that "the president and vice president expound this fact as a fact that they are actually successful in war."

"That doesn't mean I think they are not illegitimate," he added. "No, we have every right to kill the other side's warriors. But at what cost? When we do not have an effective detention policy the only option we have is to kill them before we can detain them. And if we don't detain them, we don't know what they know and what they are up to."

So, his basic argument – other than his complaint that, somehow, Obama and his administration proving that they know their stuff in war is supposedly a bad thing – seems to be that Obama is killing so many of ’em terrorists that there will be no-one left to torture interrogate! But, where shall we get our intel, then, if we keep killing all the baddies?

Oh, CPAC: a fat serving of demagogy wrapped around in a steaming coating of ignorance in a dish of oven-baked paranoia, drenched in sauce à la arrogance, complete with sides of dishonesty, propaganda and faux outrage, served with a glass of freshly squeezed diluted disgrace, and the whole with a dessert with a slight, palpable taste of sedition.

Lovely.

(via @todayspolitics)