By Bob Boldt

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The Day of the Dead celebration came a month early this year for Anwar al-Awlaki when he received a drone-gift on his front porch courtesy of Barack Obama. The popular support for the extralegal murder of this American citizen and Osama bin-Laden distresses me deeply. In America we have always maintained the pretense that we are a government of laws not men. Under Bush and now Obama this pretense has been dropped entirely as our presidents perform murder and mayhem without benefit of any evidential review or legal justification.

Obama, whom we thought would represent a return to national sanity from the offenses of the previous administration, has not only exonerated Bush’s crimes by refusing to prosecute but has taken these offenses to new levels of disgrace. Under our Constitutional lawyer, Nobel Peace (sic) President we have seen the start of secret kangaroo (military) court proceedings against the Guantanamo detainees, the entrapment of Muslim men on terrorism charges, the illegal surveillance of Mosques, the assassination of a defenseless man (Osama bin-Laden) in violation of the national sovereignty of Pakistan, and now the murder of an innocent American citizen and Muslim cleric in Yemen with the blessing and support of our former buddy Ali Abdullah Saleh—the brutal despot we should actually be killing if we really wanted extralegal justice in the world.

All the innocent (remember innocent before proven…) Gitmo prisoners should be released with our apologies for their illegal treatment and detention as should be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the real mastermind behind 9-11) whom we water boarded and whose children we tortured. All these victims are not given justice because, in an open court of law, the secrets of our infamy would be laid bare.

Why is our hero, Obama behaving so much worse that Bush? Because he, like Bush, is devoted to the full-spectrum dominance of America over the world. In pursuit of this Neocon goal, we have reverted to the old principle eschewed by our founders: the rule of men over laws where the divinely appointed despot could legally overrule any law inconvenient to his ends.

On the pediment of our Capitol building here in Missouri is emblazoned the state motto, “Let the good of the people be the supreme law.” It is time to send forth the men with their chisels to enshrine a new decree, “The voice of Obama shall be the law of the land.”