Did Rand Paul get his “Killing Americans with Drones” Idea from a Sitcom?
March 14, 2013
Someone needs to ask.
The holdup of President Obama’s choice for CIA Director John Brennan came to a dramatic head last week following Senator Rand Paul’s high-profile 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor, demanding that the president “answer a simple question: Can the President of the United States order the assassination of an American citizen on U.S. soil?”
I’m not here to debate the efficacy of the President’s choice of someone like Brennan to head the CIA, or whether or not Sen. Paul’s question has merit (remember, Cheney already gave himself the authority to shoot down a passenger plane full of Americans on 9/11), and no one seems to have mentioned the fact that U.S. embassies in foreign countries also count as “U.S. soil”, it’s merely the timing of Paul’s question that strikes me funny
I personally don’t watch the show, but Season 1, Episode 4 of NBC’s sitcom “1600 Penn” entitled “Meet the Parent” included a line in the opening scene that stuck in my memory (I edited up clips from that episodes’ opening of the line in question):
[flv:http://www.mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/1600_Penn-Using_drones_on_Americans.flv http://www.mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/video/1600_Penn-Using_drones_on_Americans.jpg 480 266]
The week prior to the January 24th episode, the network was running promos where the fictional “President Gilchrist” was threatening his daughter’s suitor with “robots that roam the skies.” Suddenly, Sen. Paul was declaring his intention to hold up Brennan’s appointment until he got an answer to the question. “Can a president use armed drones against Americans on U.S. soil?”
I did a quick Google News search, and interestingly, the first instance I can find of anyone asking that very question is The World Socialist Website (link) on February 9th. I doubt Sen. Paul is reading TWSW, but hey…
(The Right Wing “Twitchy” website run by perennial teanut Michelle Malkin that claims to “debunk Left-wing Tweets”, attacked MSN on February 11th for supposedly claiming the LAPD might use a killer drone to get that deranged cop that holed himself up in a cabin after going on a killing spree last month.)
“Loyal Liberal Lefties™” like myself have expressed concern over “domestic drones” for years mostly on privacy grounds, and RW paranoia over the use of drones within the U.S. has been a popular Tea Party talking point for years (going back to the use of drones on the U.S./Mexico border). The subject seemed to fall off the radar during the 2012 campaign, but the sudden concern over using “armed” drones “against American citizens” on the Right seems to have risen only within the past few weeks. NBC ran promos for its show between January 18th-24th. Senator Paul first announced his intention to block the Brennan nomination over drones on February 15th. A Google News Search for “drones kill American soil” going back to 2011 turned up nothing other than the links mentioned above.
In any case, I find it interesting… the “timing” anyway… that a sitting U.S. Senator may have held up the appointment of the head of the Central Intelligence Agency over a made up question about the President’s ability to “kill Americans on American soil”… a power that hasn’t been in doubt since The Civil War, and reaffirmed by a GOP that repeatedly passed/renewed The PATRIOT Act (that gives the President the power to detain an American Citizen indefinitely without charge… even “disappear” them to Gitmo or a foreign country to be tortured) over a line in a TV sitcom.
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March 14, 2013
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Posted in: fake scandals, General, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Insanity, Seems Obvious to Me, Unconstitutional, War
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