Tom Junod: The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama

AN INCREDIBLY WELL-WRITTEN ARTICLE...A MUST READ
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31813.htm
The New York Times story is in fact consistent with all the stories and with all the speeches. In every single utterance of the Lethal Presidency on the subject of its own lethality, it has offered the same narrative: that although it claims the power to kill, its combination of legal restraint and personal scruple makes the exercise of this power extremely difficult. The Lethal Presidency — and the Lethal President — wants us to know that killing is hard. It has spent months telling us this story because there is another story, a counterstory voiced off the record by administration members and confirmed by everything human beings have learned about killing in their bloody history:

That killing individuals identified as our enemies isn't hard at all.

That it's the easiest thing humans — particularly humans in power — can do.


The difference between shedding the blood of many for a cause outside yourself and shedding the blood of one for a cause of your own seems ineffable (unable to be described) — and yet it's nothing less than the difference between war and murder.