❝If liberals are going express horror at the GOP agenda as they enthusiastically support Obama’s reelection, it’s time for them to own his policies and stop trying to blame them on George W. Bush, or intransigent Republicans, or the financial crisis, or corporate campaign donations, or the desire to compromise, or an electorate that wasn’t ready for the allegedly “knighted” Obama. Barack Obama wasn’t pressured to be executioner-in-chief. He asserted himself as arbiter of which human beings to kill without trial, at times far from any battlefield, sometimes without even knowing their identities. He decided to limit congressional oversight and totally exclude the judiciary. House Speaker John Boehner didn’t define militants as all men of military age that American drones kill. The Obama Administration did that. Voters didn’t clamor for an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The Obama Administration decided to wage it. An intransigent Congress didn’t force the Obama Administration to make frequent use of the state-secrets privilege, or to keep Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, or to keep secret the legal memo that outlines the theory behind his extrajudicial assassination of American citizens. No one made Obama violate the War Powers Resolution in Libya. The president wouldn’t suffer politically if he ordered the CIA to stop firing on rescuers who rush to the scene of drone strikes, or instructed the NSA to stop spying on the communications of American citizens suspected of no wrongdoing, or stopped turning military equipment over to police.❞