Imagine if John McCain had won the 2008 election and a New York Times article revealed that McCain was sitting in the oval office lording over collection of mug shots and bios, not unlike a baseball card collection or a high school yearbook, that amounted to a kill list?  A list of targets, among them teenagers and several American citizens, that the president was personally signing off and ordering their execution. These subjects have been charged with no crime, and would never receive a day in court, but with the stroke of a pen from the President, the most powerful military in the world would now draw a bull’s-eye on your back where it would remain until you were pulverized and rendered food for worms.

If those actions could be attributed to a President McCain, Nancy Pelosi would be bum rushing every MSNBC show she could get herself on apoplectic with indignation, Mike Meyers would host Saturday Night Live and do a rendition of McCain as Dr. Evil and Moveon.org would have the entire slacktivist universe signing e-petition after e-petition. A few people might even take to the streets.

President McCain, however, is guilty of no such crime, but President Barack Obama is. Even the stunning May 29th New York Times report by Jo Becker and Scott Shane would surely have taken a more condemning tone had the president been a Republican. Instead the report seems to credit Obama for finding grey areas and legal loopholes wherein he can twist rhetorical knots that both please the moveon.org crowd and leave room for him to act like gang lord whose silent nod would send hit men out into the night to snuff out a rival.

These legal grey areas are so convoluted that the White House can claim that collateral deaths, (or to put a finer point on it: innocent people killed by drone strikes in a country that has not attacked us and poses no threat to us) are in the single digits because Obama, the legal expert, has redefined combatant to mean any male of legal age within striking distance of the target. That means if Obama wants you dead, and our drone strike kills you and the ten people around you, whoosh – all of those corpses are classified as combatants, so sleep tight with a clean conscience y’all because no innocent civilians died in the never ending war on terror today.

I can’t wait to see the Presidential debate on foreign policy. Romney is gonna have to promise that the US will save the world from the impending intergalactic invasion of the Transformers, or go all defcon 5 to outdo Obama, who – on matters relating to the global war on terror- has mindfully charged well to the right of the homicidal idiot from Texas whom we all thought was as bad as it could get.