Focus People, Focus By: Mark W Adams

For now, which time period has constituted my entire adult life of watching my fellow liberals snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, I'd like to concentrate on the issues we liberals have a hope in hell of winning.  We can't tax the Oligarchs anywhere near where the vast majority of this nation believes we should and we can't get the money out of politics which shields that corrupt system.  But we can and should ... and have GOT to stop pissing around.  More importantly, we have to stop pissing on each other.

Those two goals, and I can name a host of others, enjoy support in the 60-70 percentiles and yet year after year, decade after decade these "liberal" policy demands are given bare lip-service. Come on people, the Public Option was favored by 77%, but we couldn't get our act together enough to secure a win on that one.  Arguably, unless we tax them and throw them out of the temple of our democracy, the oligarchs will continue to feed their greed and buy off our elected officials with the tantalizing promise of making those crooks rich beyond their dreams as well -- quaint notions of ending wars and poverty will remain a fantasy of the prols and plebs.

So forgive me for not getting worked up when the Death Penalty is once again abused and misused, cuz that little bit of American Exceptionalism ain't going nowhere when only a quarter of the population oppose it.  That's "Birther" numbers people.  I'm not saying to get on any bandwagon, rather quite the opposite.  Just pick your battles. 

State Sponsored Killing enjoys popular support in this country, period.  Which brings us to the sad case of the American in al-Queda, Anwar al-Awlaki.  Barrels of digital ink have been spilled denouncing the assassination as unconstitutional, and frankly I don't care. I've been informed that I've no right to hold the opinion that the President's decision was correct and still call myself a liberal, to which I can only reply in a manner which His Rudeness will understand: "Suck my cock."

The man was a traitor. He had sworn allegiance to an organization dedicated to the destruction of western civilization and the mass murder of it's citizens.  Regardless that his actions didn't technically fit into the definition of treason and war by and between nation-states written centuries before the rise of multi-national corporate "personhood," he had no right to continue to enjoy the protections afforded American citizens -- whatever the hell that means -- and was putting my daughters and your friends in danger.  He had to be stopped. 

I see little distinction about the way in which we should treat such vermin as al-Awlaki and bin-Laden just because they were born on different continents.  Al-Awlaki's cultural heritage is what made him valuable to al-Queda. It's what made him an effective terrorist. I can't condone him being able to use that same background as a shield against recrimination. He cannot use the Constitution to protect him from actively trying to destroy the society it created.

To my eyes, if he should have been captured instead of killed, so should Osama bin-Laden. They were both human beings, were they not? Is one a lessor human just because he was an Arab? Are you endowed with a superiority gene when born in New Mexico instead of old Mexico? Feh! By Digby and the Rude Pundit's logic, anyone who cheered the death of bin-Laden needs to turn in their tie-dyed T-shirts as well, because they aren't "real" liberals either.

If that puts me in the uncomfortable company of Dick Cheney, so be it. I like his attitude on LGBT as well.  If you still think the President should be condemned for taking out a known, admitted and notorious terrorist, then you are waltzing with Ron Paul, so suck on that.

And like Abraham Lincoln, Obama has saved the constitution and the country by defending it against a nihilistic and narrow reading of the constitution that would prevent the country from protecting itself.

I have to laugh that the chief criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protesters is that they are basically an unfocused, quixotic street party.  Good god, they're the only ones out there who've identified a specific target with a grievance that enjoys popular support throughout the rest of the country: the fat cats simply have got to pony up some dough. 

That's doable folks, and it has the potential to fix so many wrongs in this nation. Crying over death row inmates or cave-dwelling bomb throwers while spitting on the closest thing we've seen to a liberally minded President since Reagan declared war on working folk is counter-productive to say the least.