We (as in the U.S.) appear to have killed al Quaeda's #2 guy with a drone strike. Again. That can't be a very popular promotion to get these days. I'm very concerned about this whole "kill list" thing -- it's legally, morally, and Constitutionally wrong. That said, I believe that one of the burdens that comes with the Presidential oath is having to judge when such actions are necessary, to take responsibility for them, and to accept the consequences for them from God and man. Just because Truman's sign isn't there any more doesn't mean that the buck no longer stops at the Resolute desk. Now, I'm not expressing an opinion one way or the other about the necessity of such a list in general or about each individual on it, but that's because I don't have the information that the President has. When I vote for someone, I'm not just saying that I support their stated goals and positions, but also that I trust them to use the experience and knowledge they have accrued and the facts to which they have access in making these judgement calls on my behalf. President Obama still has my trust. Mitt Romney sure as hell doesn't, because he's changed so many positions so many times that I can't tell what he believes in.
Now, sure the President promised during his campaign to do certain things, like close Guantanamo Bay, and then didn't follow up on those promises after taking office. I believe that that's because there is certain information that he didn't have until he became President -- that no one who wasn't President could have had -- and that based on that information and the advice of the senior military advisors who were already familiar with the situations involved (who couldn't advise a candidate) he decided that keeping those promises would not be in the country's best interests. Did he know that those decisions would hurt him when re-election time came around? Of course he did; the man's not stupid. That makes me more certain that he did what he truly believed to be right, to the best of his ability within the constraints of what is militarily possible and what the blindly uncompromising opposition in Congress couldn't block.
People sometimes forget that this isn't a true democracy, but a republic. In the purest form of democracy, every decision is made directly by the people; we would have a national election for not only every proposed addition to the kill list, but every bill that's now handled by Congress. That includes not just reforming the health care system and declaring war, but also the stuff like resolutions to honor people most of us have never heard of, or naming bridges after them, or whatever. We would never get *anything* else done, especially when you add all the business that's done at the state and local levels. I've been to township trustee meetings -- do you really want to be bothered voting on whether to fix each pothole in town, individually? Of course not. So we have this system of choosing the people who are going to handle those things for us; really, regardless of the actual job title, they're all trustees. Now, not everyone in this country agrees about what how our elected representatives should handle certain pieces of business, but we are all committed to the system wherein whoever gets the most votes win, and the people with other ideas get another chance in however many years it is for that office. (Accepting that seems to be where a lot of other countries get hung up.) In my life, I have had decisions made on my behalf by people with whom I agreed, and by people with whom I did not agree. When I don't agree, I can write blog posts, I can demonstrate, or if I really want to I can move away, but what I can mostly do is wait, and make sure I vote the next time around. And in the meantime, I have to trust that the person on whom the majority of constituents decided can in turn handle the decisions that he or she makes on our behalf. That is the most basic concept on which our system of government is founded.
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