February 24, 2015

Obama, Giuliani, and The Use of Dog Whistles to Obscure the Real Problem

By Zachary C. Sneddon
24 February 2015

It is my considered opinion that President Obama should be impeached for taking the unprecedented step of openly authorizing the drone strike assassinations of natural-born American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and Samir Khan without due process of law, in direct contravention to Article III Sections 2 and 3 and the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution he swore an oath to uphold when he took office.

Traitors the al-Awlakis and Khan may well have been, but the Constitution guarantees even traitors due process of law, which consists of more than just executive fiat.  It bewilders and dismays me that more people aren't outraged and incensed by this unprecedented subversion of Constitutional authority, but nobody else seems to give two shits because the assassinated natural-born American citizens in question were ethnically Arabic Muslims.

Then again, I don't harbor any suspicion that Barack Obama loves America any less than Rudy Giuliani.

At a recent fundraising dinner with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, former New York City Mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said, and I quote:

"I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country."

That isn't the considered argument of a rational statesman; that's the inflammatory polemic of a chicken hawk with a war boner pandering to a xenophobic base, playing up the apparent 'otherness' of the President on no basis other than his own narrow personal definition of what it means to love this country.

You know who Giuliani sounded like? He sounded like Joe fuckin' McCarthy.  Who the fuck is he to tell me what it means to love my country?  I served honorably for more than seven years on active duty in the United States Navy, don't you DARE presume to tell me what it means to love my country.  I don't respond well to this line of polemic.

You know who does respond well to this horseshit?  Racists.

I'm not a fan of this administration, but trotting out a white supremacist dog whistle to rile up the bigots who suffer from an utterly irrational anxiety born of living under the administration of a black President with a non-Anglo-sounding name--as Giuliani did--does nothing to advance the nation's political discourse.  Meanwhile, the drone war continues unabated and unremarked upon by the establishment bloc of either major party.


Relevant Links

The Atlantic:
Obama's Execution of the Drone War Should Terrify Even Drone Defenders

American Civil Liberties Union:
Blog of Rights: Anwar al-Awlaki

The New York Times:
The Drone That Killed My Grandson

Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute:
United States Constitution, Article III, Section 2
United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3
United States Constitution, Fifth Amendment
United States Constitution, Sixth Amendment
United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment

Politico:
Rudy Giuliani: President Obama doesn’t love America

The Guardian:
We dream about drones, said 13-year-old Yemeni before his death in a CIA strike