The folks behind Secure America Now -- a neoconservatve 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization dedicated to giving you a bunch of irrational anxiety attacks between now and Election Day -- brings us this new ad, complaining that the Obama administration hasn't been Dick Cheney enough in their pursuit of terrorists. This comes despite the fact that by many accounts, the Obama administration has exceeded Cheneyism in ways that even trouble writers at the National Review. (In case you've missed out on current events, the Obama White House has this super-cool club that meets on Tuesdays to decide who shall be killed to death, with drones. These occasions are literally called "terror Tuesdays," in the same way that your kids' high school cafeteria has "taco Tuesdays.")
"Ugh, whatevs!" thinks the lady in this new ad, as she smashes her laptop shut and then does the whole, "Oh, hey, I didn't see you there! Do you have time for an impotent rant about how scared I am?"
This bedraggled suburban lady is terribly aggrieved at the way the Obama administration briefly wanted to try terrorists in (the vastly more effective) civilian courts. Also, President Obama wanted to close Guantanamo and stop torturing people, as recommended by General David Petraeus, one of those "generals on the ground" to whom Commanders-in-Chief are perpetually supposed to be listening.
This might be the only ad you'll ever see that complains aloud, "He shut down the black sites!" This both presumes the formerly CIA-run torture farms were a) preferable and b) actually shut down -- as the Associated Press reported back in April of 2011, the shuttered network of secret prisons ran by the CIA were replaced by a network of secret prisons run by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. This was by design -- as Scott Horton reported for Harper's, "Recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated, he issued an executive order designed to shut down secret prisons. When the order was finally released, initially expansive language had been narrowed to cover only secret prisons run by the CIA."
But, hey, one shouldn't let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned fearmongering.
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