[Throwway32]

America is founded on the idea that personal determination and defending individual liberators are paramount to a moral society

I wonder what US citizen Anwar Al Awlaki would have said to that argument. The truth is that political free speech has limits, even for the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...

[FakeComments]

This seems a strange response, since the extra-judicial killing of an American by the Obama administration was widely regarded as a serious breakdown in American norms — precisely by the same crowd who says things like GP.

Your link then would be support for their point, not a refutation.

Generally speaking, point out something in the past few years that’s an example of what the person is talking about isn’t a way to refute that things are changed — that you can only point to recent ones is evidence that things have changed.

Of course, Obama has no respect for American traditions, broadly: he’s the first president in history not to leave the capital and to continue to be politically active during his successor’s term.

His actions certainly aren’t what I’d put forward to someone claiming that American values used to be something, but have recently changed — Obama in general is an example of that collapse in principles.

[Throwway32]

I never bought into Obama’s hype machine, but the drone strike was carried out by the United States armed forces, who are required to not follow illegal orders; via a chain of command. There is a different party in power now: have there been any prosecutions?Presumably there was a lot of legal advice that sanctioned the hit on a US citizen exercising his ostensible free speech rights,[1] otherwise it would not have happened.

[1] My personal opinion is that praising terror and “inspiring” others is not free speech, but I don’t pretend otherwise

[FakeComments]

There was a lot of pseudo-legal justification and lack of prosecutions for the Bush torture program as well, which was another violation of American norms.

You have a very idyllic view that people can’t break the rules and get away with it: Obama murdered an American in violation of the law, but there is a tradition of not holding presidents accountable for their crimes.

Personally, that lack of accountability seems to have led to a ratcheting level of presidential misbehavior and a collapse in societal norms — precisely what this thread is about.