Another reason drones matter

[pscot]

By the invaluable Charles P. Pierce:

The drone war is savage, and it is impersonal, and the legal justifications for it are as threadbare as you can get without citing the constitutional doctrine of, "Because I said so, that's why." But it also is a dangerous way to remove from us all the consequences of being at war. Even before the killer death robots began to fly, there was a lot of hand-wringing — much of it justified — that, because our wars were now being fought by volunteers, the country as a whole had less involvement in what was being done in its name than it ever had before. This concern ignore the fact that our policymakers created this phenomenon deliberately, and then used it for their own purposes. This was whence sprung the cult of The Troops, which made sure that we heard "God Bless America" at every ballgame, but also allowed our politicians to send soldiers into battle without proper equipment, and to nickel-and-dime them when they came home. (That the cult also helped de-fang any serious antiwar movement was considered a bonus by the dishonest men who planned the wars.) Within the government, though, it was even worse. The Iraq War was planned in secret, long before the attacks of September 11. The phony rationales were concocted far beyond the reach of congressional oversight or public scrutiny. The drone program is a logical outgrowth of this ongoing contempt for the public's right to know what is being done in its name. The creation of a form of warfare in which the combatants are a continent removed from the people they're fighting, and at no danger to themselves unless they slip in the parking lot on the way to their cars, is a logical outgrowth of the ongoing attempt to sanitize warfare for the home front. We have distanced the people from the decision to go to war, and now we are distancing them further from the actual fighting. This is not the way democracies are supposed to go to war, but this has been increasingly the way that this democracy has gone to war...

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/

[dgibby]

1. We are acting less and less like a democracy and more and more like

an Oligarchy(bordering on a fascist state), IMO, and it won't take too much more to push us across that border.

Makes me so sad to see what's happening to this country. I used to consider myself a moderate, but we've moved so far to the right, that I'm now to the left of the left. I think that light at the end of the tunnel is a run-away locomotive coming straight at us!

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Democracy, if you can keep it.