Al-Awlaki is cited because he was the first US citizen to be targeted under the policy. The criticism isn't about whether he was guilty or innocent, it's about the flagrant disregard for due process.

It's important to talk about cases like that precisely in order to confront the brainworms of, "He was probably a terrorist so who cares?" That mentality is precisely what got us here and it's impossible to fix the problem without firmly rejecting that way of thinking.

You don't get to give the government permission to ignore due process in some cases and not in others. That's not how laws or systems work. Either they have to follow the process even when you personally think the person is guilty, or they can ignore the process even when you think the person is innocent. Once you've given the executive the power to make the decision unilaterally, you don't get to challenge that decision. Because that what having the power to make a decision unilaterally means.

Explain themselves? Impeachment? Prison? Is that a joke?

The reason you don't understand the backlash is because you don't understand how this works.

Those were things that were at least theoretically possible in the pre-9/11 system. What Bush changed and Obama continued, was making it into a system with zero accountability. All the executive has to do is claim that they think someone's a terrorist, there is no court, no evidence required, no higher authority they answer to or that could hold them accountable. One, single person has total and complete authority to kill anyone in the world. And what al-Awlaki showed is that this applies even to US citizens.

Theoretically, if Trump wanted to, he could launch a drone strike on Ilhan Omar's house and the only obstacle would be the political backlash. Y'all simply do not appreciate the degree to which the executive acquired dictatorial power in the "post-9/11 world." Bush was just Trump but with literally 90% of the country supporting him. Trump has only gone further because of the groundwork Bush laid. The "emergency" powers from post 9/11 are still in place, they were never going away.

The president can ride his bike with no handlebars.

"Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest (of you)."

It seems the lesson they learned wasn't "don't do genocide" so much as "get someone else to do your dirty work to avoid being held accountable for genocide."

That kind of honesty on craigslist is a rarity.

I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…

I'm so glad that we'll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.

I mean, can you imagine what would've happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don't know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being "narco-terrorists," and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.

But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can't understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.

This is literally what happened before to get us to Trump, and it's on track to keep happening.

Bush was a violent extremist who started multiple wars of aggression and had people tortured in all sorts of horrific ways (some of whom were later proven innocent). But he also occasionally said not to be openly racist against all Muslims. The failure of the "War on Terror" was because of the aggression, and because of the wanton violence, torture, and disrespect for basic rights. But, the lesson people, especially on the right, took from that, was that the Bush administration lost because it was too humane, too "woke."

So they went to Trump, who was openly racist, who appointed Hegseth, who, well, is Hegseth. And he still lost in Iran. Rather than questioning whether their ideas about the effectiveness of cruelty, the right concludes that the problem was that they still weren't cruel enough.

Go back even further, it's the same shit with Vietnam. Dropping agent orange all over the place, slaughtering villages, just extreme cruelty, but the propaganda was about "nation-building," about "liberating" the Vietnamese. So when they lost, they blamed the equivalent of "woke," they blamed the limp-wristed politicians who supposedly tied the hands of the military.

When President Fuentes gets his ass kicked invading wherever the fuck, the right will just say he was too woke and will vote for someone who changed his name to Adolf Hitler. It'll continue until they start a nuclear war and end all life on earth.

Fundamentally, because right-wing ideas are just wrong and don't produce the results they expect them to, the people who hold them will grow increasingly frustrated and increasingly extreme, thinking they just need to go further and try harder, never questioning the approach itself.

It's socialism or barbarism. The "middle road" of aggression and interventionism while pretending to be nice, that's going to keep failing and the more it fails the more it fuels their narratives. We need to put an end to the aggression altogether, to put an end to foreign wars. We need to ditch the notion that our acts of violence and terror were ever driven by some kind of "benevolence," and instead denounce them for the brazen acts of imperialist plundering that they are. No war in Iran, no aid to Israel. Full stop.

This article is hilarious. What planet is the author living on?

First off, religious people generally don't give a shit about these kinds of "gotchas" or contradictions, because their beliefs and texts are full of contradictions to start with. Second, nobody expects someone like Trump, who is not a religious leader, to have exactly correct answers to theological questions. Third, nothing he said there is really all that bad.

If people are pushing back (the article is very light on actual examples), it's because the midterms, and the failed policies leading to them, have weakened his status as a "sacred cow."

The article is complete nonsense.

They also want to avoid left-wing priorities such as ending US support for Israel or abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These people are so useless.

The people are done with being told we have to tighten our belts while watching billions of dollars be sent abroad to fund war and genocide. Before Trump, that was the message that "centrists" of both parties pushed, with regards to Afghanistan and elsewhere. Then, the Trump administration made the insane decision to attack Iran and talk publicly about how gas prices were soaring because everyone just had to tighten their belts for the sake of "liberating" the Iranians. That's the single biggest reason the Republicans got slaughtered in the midterms! Now they want to keep going all in on Israel, because it's not a "kitchen table issue?" It is absolutely a kitchen table issue!

The Democrats took a hard right shift on immigration in 2024, running as border hawks, trying to push the line that they were the ones who would actually go after immigrants, and as a result, they lost the Latino vote. Now, Trump has been sending ICE to raid workplaces, going after citizens and non-citizens alike, people live in fear going about their daily lives, businesses in Latino communities have seen their customer base either locked up or to afraid to come out. I happened to see a Latino mall the other day and there were all sorts of signs posted declaring that ICE did not have permission to enter. How on earth is this not a "kitchen table issue?" I guess didn't realize that phrase meant specifically white people's kitchen tables.

You want to argue the mandate is limited in scope and doesn't extend to "culture war" issues, fine. But they're acting like there isn't a mandate at all! If they won't address these issues, then what on earth would they be addressing?

One time this Taiwanese guy showed up to a board game group and when he found out I was sympathetic to China he told me:

If you want to know more about the cultural and historical reason causing the seemingly crazy Chinese expanding ambitions. I highly recommend you read this book. It explains why Xi is being so aggressive these years and why it’s almost inevitable. It’s not the same logic most people in the world understand. Even most Chinese people aren't aware it.

And he linked me to "The China Order" by Fei-Ling Wang. I skimmed it, and it was complete drivel.

The central thesis is that Europe developed a peaceful Westphalian model that led it to respect the sovereignty of states, throughout it's history and into the present day (somehow ignoring the entire history of colonialism, the Cold War, etc), while China's historical model was based around "tianxia" which basically means that it ruled the known world, which is why it will always be a big evil meanie out to conquer the world.

Apparently this is a whole genre. Taking random snippets from China's thousands of years of extremely varied history and picking out anything that supports the thesis that China is just inherently evil. There's tons of works with similar theses written by white people, but I really can't be assed to skim more than one, Fei-Ling immigrated from China to the US and has a doctorate, and he still writes this crap, in a university press, I can't even imagine how bad the shit written by "China watchers" and pundits gets.

What's funny to me about this is that I once watched a film made during WWII produced by the US government, "Why We Fight: The Battle for China" which made the rather dubious claim that China had, "never once waged an aggressive war in it’s 4000 years of history." Change your posture towards the US, and your entire history going back thousands of years gets rewritten.

It's just so lazy and childish to paint all of Chinese history with such a ridiculously large brush like that, it's unbelievable.

Yes, dumbass. He was the head of the head of the DoD, he was the commander-in-chief, with full authority to appoint whoever he wanted to be secretary of defense and to overrule them, literally whenever he felt like.

Do you not understand how the government works? Whatever happened to "The buck stops here?"

Trump and Hegseth made that OK to do.

Trump escalated it, but it actually goes back to Clinton if not before. From Wikipedia:

According to Clinton administration official Richard Clarke:

'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government ... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: 'Lloyd says this. Dick says that.' Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'

It escalated under Bush and continued under Obama, and now we're at a point where they've straight up abducted a head of state.