Jihadi Don

Take a look at the Der Speigel cover for April 2.  El Caudillo de La Basura Blanca beheading the Statue of Liberty.  If an American drone could take out jihadi John for the Brits, do you suppose the military forces of another member of the 'Coalition of the Willing' could return the favor and do something about Jihadi Don for the Americans?

More seriously, Americans have an uncanny tendency, in long struggles with adversaries, to take on some of the characteristics of the adversary.  So, during the cold war, the military-industrial complex of the United States indisputably came to mirror in some ways the state within the state that was the Soviet defense establishment.  On a more trivial note, the United States developed a cultural infatuation with all things Japanese during the brief Japanese challenge of the 1980s.  More recently, if you look at the rise of the Religious Right in the United States and compare it to Islamic fundamentalism, if you consider the network of religious madrasas and compare it to charter schools and American faith based education, it's hard to avoid the same conclusion.  I'm not quite ready to label the American republic a failed state, but . . . regime change, anyone?

Note--the author does not approve of either drone attacks or violence by or against presidents of the United States.  The utilitarian argument in favor of using drones--that those operations result is less collateral damage than conventional military operations--ignores the reality that, in the complete absence of casualties to the force using the drone, drone attacks are undertaken with far greater frequency and in a far wider range of circumstances than would be conventional military operations.  With respect to violence involving U.S. presidents, violence against presidents is, of course, prohibited by law, and violence by presidents is a wide ranging topic raising issues far more serious than this post.  But, nobody should grab anybody by the pussy, celebrity president or not.