{"id":8785,"date":"2010-12-13T08:35:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T16:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=8785"},"modified":"2010-12-13T08:35:54","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T16:35:54","slug":"careless-words-and-callous-deeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/13\/careless-words-and-callous-deeds\/","title":{"rendered":"Careless Words and Callous Deeds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has lately become usual for right-wing columnists, bloggers, and jingo lawmakers to call for the assassination of people abroad whom we don&#8217;t like, or people who carry out functions that we don&#8217;t want to see performed. There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=d36xEvVnF2I\">past <\/a>year, and especially in the <a href=\"http:\/\/open.salon.com\/blog\/william_k_wolfrum\/2010\/12\/02\/julian_assange_must_die_for_starters\">past <\/a>six <a href=\"http:\/\/mondoweiss.net\/2010\/12\/washington-posts-new-blogger-promptly-calls-for-force-against-iran.html\">months<\/a>. Why? A major factor was President Obama&#8217;s order of the assassination of an American citizen living in Yemen, the terrorist suspect Anwar al-Awlaki. This gave legal permission to a gangster shortcut Americans historically had been taught to shun.<\/p>\n<p>The cult of Predator-drone warfare generally has also played a part. But how did such remote-control killings pick up glamor and legitimacy? Here again, the president did some of the work. On May 1, at the White House Correspondents dinner, he made an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rawstory.com\/rs\/2010\/05\/olbermann-obama-predator-drone-joke-bounds\/\">unexpected <\/a>joke: &#8220;Jonas Brothers are here tonight. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don&#8217;t get any ideas. Two words: predator drones. You will never see it coming.&#8221; The line caught a laugh but it should have caused an intake of breath. A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.<\/p>\n<p><em>Reprinted from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\">Huffington Post<\/a> with permission of the author.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has lately become usual for right-wing columnists, bloggers, and jingo lawmakers to call for the assassination of people abroad whom we don&#8217;t like, or people who carry out functions that we don&#8217;t want to see performed. There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-8785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8785"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8787,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8785\/revisions\/8787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8785"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}