Crooks and Liars

Let's remember how we got to be debating drones.

After 9/11, Republicans insisted that the United States was "at war" with al Qaeda -- a reversal from the Clinton administration, which prosecuted terrorism as crime. And because of this "War on Terror," they claimed the Constitution endowed W. with vastly expanded executive powers, including the authority to spy on Americans, kidnap people, torture them, hold them indefinitely, set up torture gulags all over the world, launch drone attacks, launch pre-emptive wars, and so on.

All of that authority, Republican partisans eagerly ceded to the President, while smearing civil liberties groups like the ACLU as being terror-loving traitors. But now that there's a Democrat in the White House, Bush/Cheney followers are today celebrating Rand Paul's "greatness" for his stand on civil liberties.

I just have one question for them.

If the president doesn't have the authority to launch a drone strike against an American citizen on US soil, why does he have the right to crush a child's testicles?

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty...

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.

Wow. You have to be some kind of "Liberal Statist" to think that way, right?