This is a chilling development.
Within days of the massacre, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Sunni Muslim branch unaffiliated with the Afghan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the deed. A spokesman said that the motive was revenge for the death, by an American drone strike, of the group’s second-in-command, and that the action had been carried out by a splinter faction of the TTP called the Jundul Hafsa. The Pakistani cook was apparently shot because the attackers assumed he was Shia. Sher Kahn believes he survived only because his name sounded to the killers like a Sunni cognomen, even though Khan is actually an Ismaili Shia.
outsideonline.com
The only comment I got on the article that I posted to my Facebook wall was from a friend from the Dan Carlin BBS (A friend that I’ve had to block on Facebook because he is dangerously unhinged when it comes to environmental issues. -ed.) He referred to president Obama by the derogatory nickname I’ve heard so many times before. Obummer. He made a decent point about blowback, but he insisted that all of this was president Obama’s fault.
When I hear someone disparaging the President (any president) for policies as if they were a ‘personal preference’ of the man sitting in office at the moment, I cringe. This is blowback for our prosecuting a war across that entire region, yes. A war started by a predecessor (including the drone strikes) and that will probably be concluded by a successor. To the extent that he defends this war, he is culpable. He’s also stated that the power vested in the Presidency today should be curtailed. Funny how no one remembers he said that.
He went on to call him a war criminal and to declare that he didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2012, that he voted Green party instead. He voted Green because he didn’t want to waste his vote again.
Funny. The first vote I’ve cast for a Democrat or Republican in more than 10 years was the 2012 election where I voted for Barack Obama; and I did that because Romney was a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. That Barack Obama abandoned progressive causes was no surprise to me. I tried to caution people before the 2008 nomination that Obama was no progressive, that he was clearly making noises about continuing wars and other policies that a progressive would never endorse. Given that the choices were Hillery, Obama or McCain, I think we got the best of three short sticks. It would be nice to actually have choices that could win and not support the status quo.
All votes are wasted if all you do is show up on election day and vote. Unless you participate in the process, the candidates are not yours anyway.
Editor’s note. I added these comments from Facebook to the blog because, since I’m editing from the future, I know that I go on to write what became the contents of the article Obama Best President Since Eisenhower about a year after this point. It was this conversation with a DCBBS alumni that was one of the key inspirations for that article. One of the flags on the field that made me wonder why there was so much hatred for Barack Obama.
I should have known then the size of the blowback that was mounting against the status quo. That there was significant unrest in the population that might well lead to an Orange Hate-Monkey presidency. Maybe I did. Maybe that is why I was so gung-ho for Hillary in 2016 even though I knew she represented little more than the status quo itself.
At least she wasn’t trying to decieve us with promises of MAGA that she couldn’t deliver. Given the choice between the status quo and being mugged as a country by a con artist, I’ll take the status quo, thanks. You will at least have noticed that the drone strikes continue even though you wasted your vote on a con artist, I hope.
