Water Boarding is “against our values”, but killing U.S. citizens here in America? That’s just dandy…

A stunning moment of clarity from White-House-flak-turned-pundit Robert Gibbs, whether he intended it to be or not:

So, “torture” (aka “enhanced interrogation”) which is inherently non-lethal and is used in training on our own military, is AGAINST our values. But killing an American citizen on American soil, without a trial…is okay?

Where are the Code Pink nut jobs with this? Still picketing Bush’s ranch, I presume.

We’ve covered the hypocritical disconnect that the Left has embraced with the Obama Administration before (“Hey, “Bush-Lied-People-Died” crowd! Where are you guys NOW?“) on Benghazi, among other examples. Yet the Left remains largely unfazed, seemingly unable to process why anyone would think their divergent positions on Presidential authority and behavior were in the least bit suspicious.

The Left has turned a blind eye to Benghazi, and every other scandal from the Obama White House (Fast N’ Furious, New Black Panther voter intimidation, Illegal Immigrants being released from detention centers “due to Sequester”, etc…). But this?

Really?

Is there nothing that this Administration can do that the Left won’t voluntarily tie themselves into a sheepshank to excuse?

Silly question:

“Poll: 41% of Democrats think president should have power to kill suspected American terrorist on American soil”

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This is yet another line-in-the-sand moment for our country. The drone program, while a useful tool in war overseas, is rife with the potential for abuse here at home:

The central aspect of the memo that critics find troubling is its vagueness.

The document outlines loose definitions of which citizens qualify as top terrorists, the circumstances under which they pose an “imminent” threat to the US, and when it’s not feasible to simply capture them.

“The takeaway is that the Obama administration took a process that is supposed to constrain the president within the law’s confines … and then qualified those constraints so drastically that it would be more honest to acknowledge that neither imminence nor infeasible capture are really required,” writes Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic, a longtime opponent of the secret drone program.

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Few of our elected leaders are sufficiently bothered by this, with Rand Paul being one of the notable exceptions. His quote below from his one-man filibuster during John Brennan’s CIA nomination is the sort of action we should demand from all of our leaders.

Courtesy of Breitbart.com:

“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA. I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, (and) without first being found to be guilty by a court.

That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination.

It is something that should not and cannot be tolerated in our country.“

This is not simply a theoretical debate.

If Barack “Peace Prize” Obama can have a citizen killed on a whim; if armed drones, which can now be as small as 4″ in length, can now “supervise” us, everywhere, from church functions to our backyard BBQs, …we’ve become a de facto police state. Forget ‘Expectation of Privacy’, forget warrants, and kiss ‘Due Process’ goodbye.

We’ll have effectively turned the President into Judge Dredd, except he won’t even have to get his hands dirty.

‘Land of the Free’?

Not any more, it’s not.