Esquire Magazine Attacks Obama On Targeted Killings

In July 2011, Esquire magazine ran a hero-worship article about Barack Obama titled, “How can we not love Obama.”

Apparently Esquire and the left are starting to figure out how. A new piece in Esquire attacks Obama for his summary judgment in the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old American who was the son of  Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who was killed two weeks before his son by a drone attack in Yemen because he was a top operative with Al Qaeda.

Esquire moans about the imperial attitude of Obama in targeting enemies of America and killing them with impunity:

“President Obama’s expansive embrace of the power to kill individuals identified as America’s enemies has transformed not only his presidency but probably all American presidencies to follow … the moral reasoning of an administration that speaks as though nothing could be harder than killing individuals and behaves as though nothing could be easier, and carries out what amounts to executions on a mass scale … Barack Obama has created the Lethal Presidency by insisting he that he has been given the power to kill, in secret, anyone who is plotting against Americans or American interests, even if he or she is an American citizen. It will be very difficult to constrain that power, no matter who is president. But if the Lethal Presidency is going to have any accountability at all, we should demand that Congress pass a law stating that if the administration kills an American citizen, it should not be able to keep all the particulars secret. The administration should be compelled to say who it killed and why. It should be compelled to say why it killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and the obvious fact that it will never do so — and that such a modest law as the one I’m proposing will never be passed — shows how entrenched the Lethal Presidency has become, and how lethal it really is.”

Compare Esquire‘s present attitude with what they said only a year ago:

“Before the fall brings us down, before the election season begins in earnest with all its nastiness and vulgarity, before the next batch of stupid scandals and gaffes, before Sarah Palin tries to convert her movie into reality and Joe Biden resumes his imitation of an embarrassing uncle and Newt and Callista Gingrich creep us all out, can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph.”

It took a year for Esquire to change its perspective regarding Obama and realize how dangerous and ruthless he is. Can the rest of the country figure it out in the next 4 months?