All over the news yesterday that the Comrade is claiming a "right" to kill American citizens that he suspects of terrorism. Useful, I suppose, for doing away with people like Al-Awlaki -- killed by drone in Yemen. However, the president, or whomever orders the kill, doesn't really need to show any evidence of anything to anyone as a rationale for ordering the kill. I suppose the Comrade will just "feel" it when it's OK to kill someone Maybe he'll ask Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid who they'd like to get rid of.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but what a freaking nightmare.
I suspect that six months ago, with such power in his hands, the Comrade would have found some nasty secrets about Mitt Romney's past, and whoosh -- a drone overflies a Republican political rally in Ohio, and that's the end of that.
Not that I don't trust the Comrade, a power-mad psychopath and demagogue, the worst ever to gain any sort of power in the country. With just about the worst judgment I've ever seen in one human being. And a very arrogant, ignorant man who believes he's some kind of mystical gift to the human race. Delusions of grandeur. (There's a medical term for that.)
Anyway... this is not a first in American history. And if the blockheads in the White House did a little homework, they'd probably feel ashamed for what they're doing... but on second thought, probably not. They're so far beyond shame, or any kind of moral sense, it's pathetic. They appear to measure "right and wrong" on a scale of how much power they can gather over other people. Really sick.
Anyway, there was this little problem during the Civil War. Slaves kept running into the Union army lines wherever it approached in the Confederacy. Until the Emancipation Proclamation, these slaves were still "owned" and had to be returned to their "owners." But the Proclamation, coming halfway through the war, even allowed blacks to join the Union army -- and they'd been banned from this honor previously.
In response to this, ol' Jeff Davis, President of the Confederacy, said that if his troops encountered any black Union soldiers -- particularly as POWs -- he'd round them up, sell them back into slavery, and hang their white officers for inciting insurrection.
So Lincoln replied that the Union would hang a Confederate officer for every Union officer the Confederacy hanged.
Mind you, up until this time, the prevailing law was that you couldn't hold a POW longer than 10 days without arranging to exchange him. POWs were routinely exchanged after every battle -- the armies that captured them didn't really want to feed them.
So both sides started building POW camps, like Andersonville in Georgia, and Elmira in New York, and now they all held a whole bunch of POWs, who were very often used like hostages. If the Union POWs were starved in Georgia, then the Union starved the Confederate POWs in Elmira, and like that. Very bad situation. No one can be proud of this at all.
Anyway.... Jeff Davis releneted on his promise to hang the white officers in the black regiments, and both sides were a little worried about retaliatory measures against POWs. The upshot was, the Confederacy didn't know exactly what to do with black Union soldiers who were captured as POWs. The final decision actually was more or less left up to the commanding officer who had captured them, who didn't want to feed them, couldn't spare the men to guard them, and pretty much despised them for their "ingratitude" and "uppityness."
So there's evidence to support the claim that many black POWs were A.) sold back into slavery; B.) used as labor for the Confederate army; C.) killed outright, like at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, which by all accounts was a bloody massacre of US Colored Troops after they had been overpowered and had surrendered.
No clear cut policy, no rules to follow, really, no conditions or tests or laws to guide the treament of black Union POWs captured in the South. I've never heard of any who were actually held in a POW camp in the Confederacy -- and I'm sure the Confederacy would have had a "special" camp just for captured blacks. But it seems they never built one.
So this comes down to "rule by man, not by law." It's all up to the person in charge.
That's about as dangerous a situation as you can imagine. That really is very much what slavery was -- putting one human being totally in charge of the life and death of another. The "master" with some "right" to do whatever he pleased with the slave. Much like totalitarianism, or whatever the hell they have in Venezuela. And to think the Comrade has just bestowed upon himself the power of life and/or death over fellow citizens is terrifying, to say the least.
What's this supposed to be? Payback for slavery? But the Comrade, nor his family, were ever slaves in the USA. Or maybe he's just too damn stupid to understand what he's doing I mean, anyone who believe "taxthe rich" is a useful economic policy can't be too bright. But I think he knows exactly what he's doing -- destroying the country, chipping away piece by piece.
I hope somebody in Washington is monitoring all this and collecting the documentation. We'll need it for the impeachment.
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