Punting the Pundits

The day I became a citizen of these United States, June 17, 2009, in the old Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, I raised my right hand and swore that I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

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The sovereignty I was abjuring was the Republic of Ireland, itself not so far from shifting its allegiance from the Irish Constitution to the dictates of European bankers. Since questions about the Bill of Rights were likely to come up in those final interviews, many people in the theater had a pretty clear notion that along with allegiance came certain important protections, such as guarantees of due process and the right to a public trial by jury. There’s no doubt that for many, with vivid memories of summary seizure and arbitrary imprisonment in their biographies, these guarantees had great significance.

But as it turns out, it was all a fraud. The Uzbek down the row from me, who had fled Karimov’s regime, probably had no need to anticipate being boiled alive — a specialite de la maison in Tashkent. But being roasted alive by a Hellfire missile, doomed by the executive order of President Obama, without due process in any court of law, for reasons of state forever secret, could theoretically lie in his future. If presidential death warrants beyond the reach of scrutiny and review by courts or juries are the mark of a banana republic, then we were all waving the flag of just such an entity.

Matthew Rothschild: Qaddafi’s Death: Barbarism and Hypocrisy

I never mourn the death of a dictator.

Good riddance to Muammar Qaddafi, who terrorized his people for 42 years.

But neither do I cheer summary executions of anyone, no matter how brutal.

Just as the United States was wrong to rub out an unarmed Osama bin Laden, so, too, the Libyan rebels were wrong to murder the captured Qaddafi.

You can see the rebels parading Qaddafi around still alive.

You can see them bouncing his head up and down after he’s apparently dead.

The answer to barbarism is not more barbarism.

Amnesty International is right to ask for an investigation into Qaddafi’s death.

Nor do I applaud President Obama’s triumphalism.

Eugene Robinson: At a Loss for a World View

The demise of Moammar Gadhafi is big news around the world. Note to the Republican presidential candidates: This will come as a shock, but there are lots of other countries out there, and what happens in some of them is really important. Anyone who wants to serve as commander in chief should be paying attention.

This advice is aimed most urgently at Herman Cain, who wears his ignorance of international affairs as a badge of honor. “When they ask me who is the president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know,” he boasted recently. “And then I’m going to say, ‘How’s that going to create one job?'” For the record, Uzbekistan is a strategically important Central Asian nation whose president is named Islam Karimov.