I was going to post the second in my three-part series on checks and balances in our government today, but I’ve been watching the news, and I need to call an audible.
Because a top-shelf, five-star, chef’s kiss example of lefty hypocrisy – the Democrat outrage over Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan drug boats, and Hegseth’s alleged “kill the guys in the water, too!” order – demands a response.
Spoiler alert: reports of that order are BS, as even a story in the New York Times admits. (It’s a Christmas miracle!)
First, I do think it’s a topic worth debating and scrutinizing, as we should do with all uses of government power. Unfortunately, I think it’s a debate we’ll need to have amongst ourselves, because the Democrats have rendered themselves totally unable to be taken seriously on this kind of moral issue, and on this specific moral issue.
Who can maintain a straight face while listening to their concern about the ramifications of taking the life of a criminal bringing poison into our country when they’ve not shown a fraction of that concern over the death of law-abiding citizens here? They didn’t care about the young woman lit on fire by a recidivist criminal in Chicago; they didn’t care about the dead Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by another recidivist on the bus in Charlotte. Not only did they not care about Charlie Kirk getting murdered, many of them actually celebrated it. I could go on and on. (They didn’t care about raped and murdered Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, etc. and etc.)
But it’s even worse than that. If you’ll just sit down and let them lecture to you about morality, they’ll explain about the important context in which the different types of violence occurred. Because the drug smugglers were killed directly by the US government, you see. Whereas the wave of violence they’ve unleashed on the country was only carried out by the millions of unvetted foreigners whom the US government allowed in with no oversight, or career-criminal US citizens whom Democrat governors and mayors repeatedly released to continue preying on innocent Americans.
Um… I don’t think that’s quite the persuasive justification that our leftist friends think it is.
But never mind that. Because there IS a direct analogy to Trump’s attacks on drug dealers intent on killing Americans that seems to have slipped the Dems’ minds. And conveniently enough, it was carried out by the most popular and highly respected Democrat of this century: Barack Obama.
You may remember him as the flawless Light Bringer™, who was definitely not an arrogant narcissist like the Bad Orange Man.
No, no. He was the kind of modest guy who would say the following quote, which I swear I am not making up. On June third of 2008, when describing what his winning the Democrat primary would mean for the world, he said, “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal….”
There was even more to that quote, nauseatingly enough. He also said that his rise would signal “the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless,” and on and on.
And he was right. Because on June second of 2008 – I remember it well – I walked to our local hospital and kicked the crutches out from under a one-legged man, and yanked the cannula out of the nose of an octogenarian lung cancer patient, before going to my job and firing a bunch of tutors who worked for me. Because if there were two things I loved in life, it was keeping healthcare from the sick and making people jobless.
I mean, other than defecating in the ocean and urinating on the earth. Because I hated them both so much.
But then, the very next day, Obama brought me to my senses with his announcement that the oceans and the earth were going to be just fine, and he was going to heal all the sick people. And that’s when I realized that I had been foolishly worshipping Jesus, when I could have been devoting myself to the holy Community Organizer and his scowling outside linebacker of a wife. (Go TCU! De-fense! De-fense!)
I had been blind, but now I saw!
You probably see where I’m going with this: Barry droned the hell out of half the world, and the MSM must have been taking those 8 years off, because they had very little to say.
And it was even worse than I remembered. I knew that he’d taken out some people in some of the more terrorist-infested parts of the world, but if pressed, I would have guessed that he ordered maybe a dozen drone strikes.
But I just researched that, and came across a site called, “The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,” which bills itself as independent and non-profit, and looks reasonable, if clearly left-leaning. And I found that Obama had actually ordered 563 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen! For comparison, that is almost 10 times the number of strikes (57) carried out by George W Bush during his 8 years as president.
For those of you youngsters out there, W Bush was Hitler after Hitler had been Hitler, and before Trump became Hitler. So you can imagine how terrible he was!
And yet Obama left him in the dirt, when it came to drone strikes. (And that dirt was gently drifting down to settle on and coat the ground. Because of the explosions from all the drone strikes.)
But when some Americans criticized all the drone strikes, Obama’s administration insisted that “drone strikes are so ‘exceptionally surgical and precise’ that they pluck off terror suspects while not putting ‘innocent men, women and children in danger.’” (I didn’t make those quotes up either.)
Yet, when pressed to release data on how many civilians were killed in those strikes, it turned out that the number was not, in fact, zero. As of the end of 2015, the administration put the number at between 64 and 116. Various outside sources put the number at between 380 and 801.
But even taking Obama’s numbers at face value – which, shame on you if you fall for that – does 116 civilians sound like the result of “surgical strikes” to you?
If so, I’d like to meet your surgeon.
0-0-0
Open scene, with a gowned doc standing over a patient on a table, with a nurse standing by:
Nurse: Would you like a scalpel, so you could make a surgical cut, doctor?
Surgeon: Nope. Just give me a meat cleaver and a butcher knife. Ooh, and a DeWalt drill with a 2-inch spade bit! Let’s DO THIS! (Holding his fist toward the nurse.) Fist bump.
Nurse: Uhhh…aren’t we supposed to be sterile?
Surgeon (waving at her dismissively): Ok, Debby Downer. Just hold this guy down.
Nurse (alarmed): He’s not even under anesthetic yet?
Patient: Wait!
Ten…seconds…layter…
Surgeon: Man, that is a lot of arterial spray!
Patient (shrieking): Ahhh! I’ve gone blind!!
Surgeon: Oh, man up. That’s just the blood in your eyes.
Patient (thrashing): Is there supposed to be blood in my eyes? Why is there blood in my eyes?!
Nurse: I think I see his cervical vertebrae! What are you doing?!
And, scene.
0-0-0
Where was I? Oh yeah. Barack the Drone-a-nator. (Tag line: He’ll be bock…to strafe your Ramadan feast!)
At the time, I didn’t complain about Obama’s strikes, partly because I never heard about most of them. (Thanks, objective reporters!) But also because I don’t have double standards. If he was going after terrorists in terrorist havens, I understand that to be part of war. And another part of war is that civilians unlucky enough to be close to enemies when they are struck might become collateral damage.
See: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and every other war since Nancy Pelosi’s dad led a chariot charge that flattened a bunch of Hittite “No Pharoahs!” protestors in the Valley of the Kings 3500 years ago.
You know who else didn’t get outraged about Obama’s darkening the skies with drones and airborne terrorist body parts? Most Americans, and 99.9% of Democrats.
Now fast forward to the last month or so, and those same Democrats are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and shaking their tiny fists in rage, because Trump is mowing through drug-running boats like Dirigible Pritzker mowing through a custom-made five-foot-long Subway sandwich.
And it’s not like we’re sinking Carnival cruise ships with a shoebox of meth and 1200 souls on board, or smugglers who are carrying some drugs and a handful of tourists on a deep-sea fishing excursion/drug run.
These boats are tiny, and their entire cargo is drugs, and their entire crews are cartel members!
Look, I don’t have my Masters in Drone-ology. But I did complete all the coursework, before changing my career goal to English professor. And when I was studying for the final drone exam, I came across this sample question:
Consider this hypothetical scenario: You have a visual lock on three evil enemies of your nation. You can choose only one of them to engage with a warhead suppository, with the goal of killing the bad guy while minimizing the chances of injuring or killing nearby noncombatants. Would you drone:
A. A terrorist driving in a car with one of his wives and a couple of his kids dressed as suicide bombers for Muslim Halloween. (No treat! Only trick!)
B. A terrorist sitting in a crowded café surrounded by civilians while watching Satan’s sport. (i.e. soccer. Duh!)
Or
C. A cartel member all by himself – in a drug-filled boat on a large body of water, miles away from the closest civilian.
(Rumors that Eric Swalwell – while taking and failing that test, and then settling for a career in Democrat politics – first chose “A,” then scratched that out and chose “B,” have not been confirmed.)
I wish somebody in the Trump administration would ask me to write a statement for Trump to deliver to the press, like the one he gave when we killed Anwar al-alwaki. I’d have him walk down that red carpet, clear his throat, and read this off the teleprompter:
“As of now, my administration has conducted 14 strikes on cartel drug boats. And they’ve all been just terrific, in terms of explosions, and when it comes to dead terrorists. Nobody’s ever seen anything like these strikes! People are saying to me, “Sir, you’ve saved millions of American lives already, just from the drugs you’ve already blown up.” That’s what they’re saying.
But I know that many of you in this room, and especially those of you who are stupid – you know who you are, and frankly, you’re very stupid people, let’s be honest – are saying that these strikes are unprecedented, and I should be more presidential, like some of the dwarves who held this office before me.
Like Sleepy, and Horny, and Grudgy. You know who I’m talking about.
Well, even very stupid squirrels find an acorn once in a while, so maybe you’re right. Maybe I should treat this threat like my predecessors have. In fact, I’ve been told that Barack Obama set a fine example.
So today, I pledge to you that I will follow in Obama’s footsteps, just to make the low-rated losers in the fake news media happy. While I’ve carried out 14 drone strikes on terrorists, Obama carried out 563.
So after I launch 549 more drone strikes to kill terrorists, I’ll stop right there, and Barry and I will be tied.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Man, did that feel good to get off my chest! Tomorrow or Friday I’ll post Part 2 on Checks and Balances, and update you with any CO site news if I have any.
Thanks for checking in, and for subscribing!
Martin Simpson 