Obama has kept the worst parts of Bush/Cheney's illegal wars of terror on our civil liberties and he's gone them one step further. Now he's killing American citizens with impunity and no one on seems to care much.
Now I'm sure Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't a nice guy and he very probably meant Americans harm and he may have plotted to kill citizens of this country. And the world may be a better off place in the wake of his state sanctioned murder but one thing still stands out about his death: he was a citizen of the United States of America and as such he was entitled to due process of law, which meant that he had a right to face his accuser in court, a right to defend himself, and he was innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I don't give a shit what the CIA or some shadowy military intelligence outfit said he did or didn't do, he was a citizen of the USA and that means he had rights. It doesn't matter that he lived in Yemen and said shit about the USA, he was still a citizen and he had a right to free speech, which means he could say what he liked. It doesn't matter if you hated what he said, he had a right to say it.
What matters here is that whoever is in the White House can, under the Bush/Cheney/Obama rules of war, determine who is and who isn't a terrorist and then they can murder them without having to put them on trial in a court of law. This is what Bush hath wrought. This is what we've become, a nation of bloodthirsty savages who are no better than the people we claim to hate and fear and have gone to war against. We have met the enemy and he is us.
I trust the intelligence gathered by the CIA about as much as I like organized religion. Intelligence has and always will be manipulated and twisted to fit the whims of those in power. If one day Obama or whoever takes office after him one day reads my blog and decides that he doesn't like it, he can call me a terrorist and fire a drone at my home. He can have me clapped into irons and taken to Gitmo. And I can't fight it. I won't have the rights that so many men and women fought for for so many years because the rules have changed, they were changed by a little thing called the Patriot Act. Remember that? Remember how Obama was going to roll that back? Yeah, how'd that go for us? About as well as his promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts.
The process of turning the presidency into an imperial branch of government that answers to no one that began with Nixon really got it's legs during the Bush/Cheney years and now it's being driven even further under Obama. And that is one of the main reasons why I will never vote for Obama again.
I'm ashamed of what our nation has become. I'm ashamed of Obama. I'm ashamed that hardly anyone is ashamed. We've become what we were supposed to be fighting against. And the sad fact is, we'll never ever go back to 'normal.'
The Spineless Wonder is gonna do it again. He's going to cave to the military/corporate complex that really runs this country. He's not going to veto the awful defense bill that will allow indefinite detention of Americans in the name of the never ending wars of terror. 
