Wednesday, February 06, 2013

ANTI-DRONE BEDFELLOWS: STRANGER AND STRANGER

Fox Nation, The Weekly Standard, Matt Drudge, and various right-wing blogs seem to be celebrating an anti-drone resolution that just passed in the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia. NBC News tells us about the resolution:
The Charlottesville City Council on Monday night rebuffed an attempt to totally ban unmanned aircraft in the city's airspace, according to U.S. News & World Report, and instead passed a resolution that pledges that the city will not use information obtained by drones in court.

Local activist David Swanson and The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group, brought the resolution to council members....
So Fox Nation is excited about a resolution backed by David Swanson -- a former communications coordinator for ACORN whose book War Is a Lie was praised by Mumia Abu Jamal? ("It's self-published, brilliantly and passionately written, and while being truthful is full of hope of destroying the military-industrial-media-congressional-imperialpresidential-complex.") David Swanson, whose group WarIsACrime.org used to be the anti-Iraq War group After Downing Street, and is a coalition that includes Code Pink?

And the Rutherford Institute? Well, I guess it's no surprise that Rutherford and Fox might be on the same side -- Rutherford was the principal backer of Paula Jones's lawsuit against Bill Clinton -- although Rutherford's interests seem to be a mix of religious issues and secular civil-liberties issues. (Rutherford doesn't like abortion or RFID-enabled school ID badges.)

I'm sure there are Ron Paul and Firedoglake fans who'll see this as a sign of an emerging lefty/libertarian anti-authoritarian coalition. Me, I think folks at Fox and the Standard will use any stick that comes to hand to beat Barack Obama and other Democrats with -- the mainstream right will delight in drones and surveillance and targeted killing as soon as the responsible party has an (R) next to his name.

But for now, having struggled for four years to bring Obama down by attacking him from the right, the wingnut media seems to be making efforts to attack him from the left. Given the fact that Americans approve of the overseas drone campaign by a 62%-28% margin, I don't think it'll work. But media rightists will try anything.

2 comments:

Victor said...

The way drones are being used right now, imo, may very well be unconstitutional.

Executing Americans without following any judicial processes, just for "known" terrorist affiliations, makes Gitmo look like Club Med.

But, will Republicans sieze on this possibly legitimate Constitutional issue for anything other than to beat Obama and the Democrats over the head with?
Will they try to impeach him?

I doubt it.
Like you said, Steve, Republicans will want this "Executive Privilege" for their very own, if/when one of theirs becomes President.

If George W. Bush was doing this, it would be wrong. And just because Barack Hussein Obama is doing it, doesn't make it right.

I really can't defend this at all, and won't even try to.

Mike said...

I do have to wonder how those approval numbers would change if more Americans understood the details of the "drone war"; it's hard to say with any confidence that the public approves of a program when most of the details about it have been kept from us.