"This is insane. This is monstrous. This is deeply, unforgivably, irredeemably evil."

(II) A Story for the Children: "Making Friends With Evil"

To the extent the mother allows herself to be aware of the terror in her children's eyes, she knows that it reveals their failure to accept fully the Good Ogre regime. This is a sign of great danger. She wants her children to be safe and to remain alive. Isn't that what every parent wants? When the children's eyes are as expressionless as hers, they will be safe. We make ourselves dead, so that we may remain alive. An infinitesimal flicker at the corner of her mouth indicates the beginning of a bitter smile. Once, the mother thinks, I would have appreciated the horrifying irony of that idea. She stops the thought, and the flicker disappears. She continues reading.

"The notion that the Ogre council can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy."

The use of "in effect" is a nice touch, the mother muses. As if the Ogre isn't actually ordering the death of one of his own citizens, not really. Except that he is. And if he can order the death of one of them, without any judicial process or evidence, he can order the death of any of them, even of a vast number of them. Stop it, she orders herself.

No, the only remarkable thing about Obama's direct order to murder his fellow American citizen, Anwar al-Alwaki, is its openness. A few weeks ago, he sent his intelligence chieftain, Dennis Blair, to Congress to openly proclaim the president's "right" to kill American citizens arbitrarily. Bush had kept this claimed power obscured, letting it out in dribs and drabs of directed leaks, and hints and winks in public statements; but Obama has taken us beyond that, to the open declaration and institutional entrenchment of the principle of death without due process for citizens. This indeed is "change" -- with a vengeance.

(And to think that only a few years ago, capital punishment -- with its vast and cumbersome legal machinery -- was banished in America as too unjust and arbitrary in its application; now a president need not trouble himself with the slightest bit of legal process if he wants to have someone killed. I suppose this too is "progress": more streamlined, more efficient, quicker, more modern -- like wireless broadband. It's simply there all the time at the president's pleasure.)

Now, there can be no shuffling, no waffling on the matter. Obama has made it crystal clear for even the most avidly self-duping progressive: He will murder his fellow citizens without trial or evidence if he sees fit. The state can murder whom it pleases. This is the system we have. This is what you support when you support Barack Obama. You cannot escape this logic, this judgment. If you support Obama now, in this, then there is no crime he can commit that you will not support.