The Obama Presidency: Week One, in Review

Biggest non-story of the week: Obama is a murderer.

Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.

[...]

Eight people died when missiles hit a compound near Mir Ali, an al-Qaeda hub in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. Seven more died when hours later two missiles hit a house in Wana, in South Waziristan. Local officials said the target in Wana was a guest house owned by a pro-Taleban tribesman. One said that as well as three children, the tribesman’s relatives were killed in the blast

But I’m sure those three children were enemy combatants.

Well, that didn’t take long. (Update: It’s 22 dead now, of which between 4 and 7 were “bad guys.”)

It’s hard to get a grip on exactly what happened. Mabye there was some shady intelligence and the U.S. acted on it, like they always do, by dropping a big effing bomb. Or maybe Obama just wanted to reassure the neocons that he would meet the quota of ‘wogs dead in the desert’ during his administration. But hey, did you see those inaugural balls? These days, it seems like killing brown people is a requisite part of the presidency. It’s as American as baseball and apple pie.

Warrantless wiretapping is okay.

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

The liberal Rachel Maddow objects to the conventional wisdom that Afghanistan gooood, Iraq baaaad:

More murder by the Obama army. Read the whole thing. With the coming troop shifts from Iraq to Afghanistan, you can expect these types of events respond accordingly. That blood is on your hands, Mr. President.

This is just embarrassing:

I imagine that, one hundred years from now, historians will look back upon the ‘glory days’ of the U.S. empire (roughly 1945-2010) with utter disdain, seeing an era of moral bankruptcy. Sons and daughters will ask their parents and educators: Why did the American people, who sincerely considered themselves the leaders of the free world, consent to the genocide and immiseration of countless millions of their fellow men? And I imagine they will have the same puzzled response that I do today: “I just don’t know.”

“Democracy” here and abroad: Ain’t it great?