Current Events > I miss Joe Biden

(+) Yeah! (+)

It was nice having a leader like Obama or Biden who seemed to be really nice people that had empathy in their hearts

1. You didn't need to think of every day
2. Who would respond to a crisis with humanity. Whenever there was a shooting, you never had to worry Biden would do anything but extend his condolences.

Droning American citizens and refusing to pull support for Israel during a genocide suggest otherwise.

I do understand your sentiment and I'm not trying to be snarky, and Trump's fascist regime is obviously far worse, but to me it's like saying I miss Bush just because he was goofy and affable.

Droning American citizens and refusing to pull support for Israel during a genocide suggest otherwise.

The type of lack of thinking done by single issue and non voters.

If Anwar al-Awlaki didn't want to be droned, he could have not joined a terrorist organization as a field commander and levied war against the US. That was his choice and killing him was completely legal the same way it was to shoot Confederate officers on the battlefield

Droning American citizens and refusing to pull support for Israel during a genocide suggest otherwise.

I do understand your sentiment and I'm not trying to be snarky, and Trump's fascist regime is obviously far worse, but to me it's like saying I miss Bush just because he was goofy and affable.

Doing it to an American without a trial was a bad precedent, but it killing his 16-year-old son was the bigger problem.

Sorry, anyone who complains Obama droned al-Awlaki just isn't being serious at all.

And convenient "DRONEZ" stopped being an issue about late January of 2017

I used plural for "citizens" intentionally because of his son meeting the same fate. And for the sake of brevity, I chose that example over plenty of others I could list.

Also, he was the asshole who sent his 16 year old son to be raised by an Al-Qaeda leader. Said son died when said Al-Qaeda leader was droned. Literally nobody involved knew he was there until after the fact. Bluntly, that was on al-Awlaki.

Part of the problem were the alarmingly lax conditions under which Obama allowed targets to be droned via signature strikes.

"Senior military officials defend controversial tactic despite US government admitting it does not always know how many civilians it kills"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/01/obama-continue-signature-strikes-drones-civilian-deaths

This wasn't the argument at all. We know now that the drone program was also absolutely successful with regards to devastating al-Qaeda and the ratio of collateral damage was nowhere near as high as claimed initially.

Also? Every member of the Whiskey Rebellion killed by George Washington was a US citizen, as was every Confederate soldier. As were the five confirmed German-American SS officers killed in WW2. This country killed its own citizens before the Constitution was even formed, in Shay's Rebellion. The idea that Trump saw a high-ranking al-Qaeda officer killed and thought that was the perfect precedent to drone people in Oregon is farcical.

Droning American citizens

I'm not sure what you mean by "This wasn't the argument." It literally is; I am bringing it up because we're having a discussion that's allowing us to further our points.

Are you seriously defending signature strikes? If so, what's your reasoning for that being OK but not Israel leveling Gaza to kill Hamas? Is it the difference in quantity and, if so, at what point do you draw the line that too many innocent people are getting killed?

what did i miss here?
when did they use drones to attack US citizens?

Well, probably the targeted nature of it. Israel's attacks have been rather indiscriminate, whereas targeted drone strikes weren't. even at the maximum estimates of dead civilians killed by drone strikes under Obama, Israel has killed over 50 times that times, despite drone strikes being conducted over multiple countries for much longer periods of time.

Obama was not leveling Pakistan or Yemen. In fact, we found Bin Laden living in a cozy compound in Pakistan like right out of a neighborhood with a bunch of their high ranking officials and we just pretended we didn't see anything suspicious about that for the sake of international peace.

One of the first things Trump did was remove civilian safeguards from the drone program and he killed more people in one year than Obama did in eight. Most anti-drone leftists didn't make a peep about it.

I'm surprised that you don't think signature strikes were indiscriminate when the criteria could simply be a military-aged male in an area.

"One tragic blunder came on Dec. 12, 2013, when a U.S. drone flown by Joint Special Operations Command killed 12 Yemeni civilians in a single signature strike, leading the U.S. government to reportedly make about $1 million in condolence payments. Amnesty International, which examined 45 drone strikes in Pakistan between January 2012 and August 2013, reported that one signature strike killed 18 laborers and injured 22 others in July 2012."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/05/obamas-most-dangerous-drone-tactic-is-here-to-stay/#cookie_message_anchor

I reject the whataboutism regarding Trump, since I've spoken out against Trump countless times and Trump being worse doesn't absolve Obama or Biden from criticism.

What should his 2028 slogan be?

One of Al-Qaeda's senior commanders and chief recruiters, Anwar al-Awlaki, was born in the US. He left to join Al-Qaeda and became one of their chief leaders in Yemen wher ehe played a huge role in planning attacks, recruit, and fomented numerous assaults in and out of the US.

He was killed in a drone strike in Yemen

Oh, i see
Then i think that if one assumes that Al-Qaeda deserves to be hit (but that's a whole other issue) then their commanders citizenship status really doesn't matter

Yeah, because most strikes were in active war zones or Al-Qaeda compounds.

I think there's levels to it myself. I don't think we should be droning mob bosses or gang leaders in NYC. I do think the military has the right to target the leaders of enemy military organizations involved in active war with the US and....that's basically al-Awlaki.

I think there's levels to it myself. I don't think we should be droning mob bosses or gang leaders in NYC. I do think the military has the right to target the leaders of enemy military organizations involved in active war with the US and....that's basically al-Awlaki.

I don't see a difference between that and killing a German-American SS member in WW2

I can literally only see 12 posts in this topic lol

Oh, i see
Then i think that if one assumes that Al-Qaeda deserves to be hit (but that's a whole other issue) then their commanders citizenship status really doesn't matter

Hes only better in the same way that a solid turd on the dinner table is better than diarrhoea all over the dinner table.

Hes only better in the same way that a solid turd on the dinner table is better than diarrhoea all over the dinner table.

So yes, a lot better, but still not remotely something you actually should want or miss.

Legit made huge headways in consumer and employee protections that haven't been seen since the 60s. Probably the best policies of any president in my lifetime, so far.

Who decides if the US is at war and who the enemy is? The executive (let's be real, Congress has been irrelevant for decades regarding this).

So Trump's word vomit about the US being at war with drug smugglers is a "justification" for his recent strikes against Venezuelan boats that is comparable to the justification for earlier drone strikes.

Of course this is nonsense because all Trumpist bullshit is nonsense, but it is nonsense that has 6 votes for it on SCOTUS, so it has to be taken seriously.

I miss the days when Americans were more smarter, or at least appeared to be and acted like they were smart, decent people.

I miss Joe Biden, then I realize the shit with Israel/Gaza and wished we had someone far better than Joe Biden as president. Someone who wouldn't put up with the needless cruelty of continuingly innocent Palestinian citizens by Israel for very long. My God he sucked at that one issue and is a stain on his legacy.

It's not that I disagree it can and is being abused heavily, but there's some big and obvious differences between drug smugglers and Al-Qaeda, I think we can agree. And Trump wouldn't wait for precedent TO do it.

Al-Qaeda is a military organization that has performed military strikes. One of the chief targets on 9/11 was the Pentagon and they'd bombed military bases before that.

From the point of view of process, there really is no difference between these two cases. In both situations, the executive branch/the president can issue kill orders which are followed, and there is no accountability to anyone for these executions.

"of course" this is reasonable when the target is literally bin Ladin or the like, and "of course" it's a abuse when the target is a boatful of people that could just as easily have been arrested.

But "of course" is a stupid way to define government powers.