Is there any consistency at all to your stuff? You yammer on about fascism in the US, and then a President comes out and kicks the leading Fascist square in the cubes, and you find it un-presidential. But if he DIDN'T fight back, you'd go on about how Obama was too weak or secretly in league with Trump or some such nonsense.

I'm half-convinced you've moved from Buffoonville to Looneytown these past months. Let's see.... There was the rise of Beck and how he's Murdoch's puppet.... And before that, the Jews the Jews they're everywhere, oh those tiresome Jews..... And of course, Assange and Wikileaks, which was driven by the Jews. Or China. Or Murdoch..... And now this. Hidden pressures and un-presidential actions.

And in EACH case you posit mysterious forces behind the events. Which is fine. Because sometimes, the world does have actual conspiracies. Sometimes, what we see doesn't add up because there are real other forces in behind.

But the thing is, you have to provide some THEORY or some EVIDENCE or some PATTERN that provides traction for people. That way, your idea can stimulate people to do some actually thinking or researching. and possibly, be proven or disproven.

But you just throw out one vaguely-formed conspiracy after another, and when events change, you shuffle it all around.

Right now, it just sounds like you've run out of things to say, but still want to have some excitement, and so you write blogs, completely gleefully aiming to instigate, and so, you conjure up mysterious bogeyman.

It's like you're becoming Dagblog's Beck, only without the substance.

The Donald certainly didn't get under his skin. My take is Obama tried to time everything in the hopes of burying it.

No armed resistance by anyone? A guard shot at a SEAL so the SEAL had to shoot OBL in the head? We are into low thresholds. (First reports said OBL had a gun and was holding his wife, later reports said he was unarmed, not holding anyone. Will be hard to get the right evidence.)

From your NYT article:

“But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous,” he said. “If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him.”

Other experts noted that the members of the Navy Seals faced difficult conditions, moving through dim rooms under gunfire, and needing to make a split-second judgment about whether Bin Laden posed a threat.

“They say he was unarmed now, but did the Seals know he was unarmed?” said Scott L. Silliman, an expert on wartime legal doctrine at Duke University Law School. “It was in the dark. They were wearing goggles.”

There is really no difference I can see between the Seals doing what they did and the police special units doing a similiar action on a drug house where there is armed resistance going on.  The big difference is one occuring on US soil and one occurring on foreign soil.  In the former we use the local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, whereas on foreign soil, we use military forces.  Probably a better comparison is when the FBI is attempting to "bring to justice" those deemed domestic threat/terrorists.  Can anyone say Ruby Ridge. 

In the end, the SWAT team putting a bullet through the eye of some citizen who has resisted arrest has in effect declared war on that individual.  There are of course specific things about powers of government tied to the declaration of war, which is differenent from a more usage by individuals.  And we need to work those out.

The lines between all of these are getting blurred, but in part that is because the threats themselves blur those lines.  If a terror cell is planning an action similiar to those that occurred in the US and Spain, but much of the operational planning and support is occuring in countries where the target countries don't have jurisdiction, what are they suppose to do if working with the likes of the international banking system to freeze assets, etc aren't going to be effective. 

I would disagree that any of my comments indicate that I don't care about (1) the definition of this "war," and (2) whose rights must be ignored in the name of the greater good.  What it seems is that we both care about this issue but disagree on the exact answers to (1) and (2).  That doesn't mean I don't care about the issues. 

I would argue that there are NGOs and loosely affiliated individuals which pose a threat to the US (or any other country).  Some of these are domestic, in that they are citizens are the core of the leadership and operatives. Some are foreign.  In the effort to address all of these threats, it is impossible to give some clean one sentence: "we are at war with X."  I would point to the international black market in nuclear weapons.  Who are we at war with here.  But to address it we need both law enforcement agencies across the globe working together, and sometimes the use of military personnel to step in for specific operations. 

In the process, we need to balance the rights of individuals with the greater good.  Or in this recent case, the rights of states and their sovereignty and the greater good.  Sometimes the situation is clear cut, other times it is blurry.  I agree with the Isreali interrogator I heard long ago who said torture should remain illegal, and that if the interrogator believed the situation demanded it, then he or she should be willing to go before his or her peers in a trial and say this is why I broke the law.  

What we have is world that is in some ways the same as it always has been, violent and dangerous, but in other ways have become increasingly complex.  The government must deal with the Timothy McVeighs of the country, the terrorist cells, the Russian mob and the Columbian cartels.  At the same time must operate with various states who have various levels of willingness to cooperate and ability to cooperate.   They are dealing with bomb threats and cyber attacks and bank accounts and stolen plutonium. 

Much of this is not war in the traditional sense, but I tend to think that these are very serious threats. And that governments also use these very serious threats as a way to illegitately decrease the rights of citizens.  And at the same time there are times when rights must be given up or suspended temporarily or modified for the greater good.  It is all messy.   I do care that we continually address these issues, but I don't think there is ever going to be a point when we can say "there it is all clearly defined for every situation. This is war and that is a police action, etc etc."