He seems to be everyone’s favourite president, and he’s certainly more popular than the current one, both in the US and abroad, and I’ll admit, there’s no denying Barack Obama’s charm, eloquence and intelligence. However I firmly believe that when you look past those elements of personality you realise some troubling things. One of those things is his use of drones.
With that being said I want to address something the 44th president has done on two occasions whilst speaking about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Both here and here he cries on camera when speaking about these tragic shootings. I am not here to speculate whether or not he was genuinely moved to tears, he is, of course, only human and the murder of children should move anyone, however, he is also a politician and one that is trying to push a political agenda, and he knows tears are a powerful message. We must bear that in mind.
The reason I use the phrase crocodile tears is because of the Obama administration’s upping the use of drone strikes. These are extrajudicial targeted strikes meant to be there in the place of a ground invasion. On the face of it this seems preferable, as they scale back the cost and casualties that a full scale war would bring. In reality, however, the use of drones strikes is still a horrible, messy program and many innocent lives are taken.
For example, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has put the number of children killed in Pakistan alone, by these so-called targeted drone strikes, under Obama, at 56. Adding all the children dead from strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, the number reaches above one hundred. And these are just the children.
Can anyone imagine for one second, another country doing that to the United States; if they did, it would undoubtedly be called terrorism.
So, why, as Commander-in-Chief, is the President not held responsible for the civilians that his government knowingly kills with drones? So I ask Mr Obama, you cried for the 20 dead at Sandy Hook, but where are the tears for those 100+ children that you were happy to kill with drones? And why the deafening silence from the media?
This is why I question the President’s tears. If he can hold a press conference giving condolences to the families who have lost children in these mass shootings, why did he never hold one for the families who died at the hands of his meticulous targeted strikes. . My suspicion is that he knows very well that he will never meet the families of the children he killed in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan or Afghanistan so will feel less guilt, he can easily forget. Moreover the media too, doesn’t really care, unlike when there is a mass shooting, when we hear about it non stop for days, when it’s the US government doing the killing, it barely gets a mention.
The former President says in the beginning of the video , I linked to above, about the mass shooting,
…our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from…high schoolers at Columbine and from first-graders in Newtown
I have a final question for the 44th president. Do you believe that children in foreign countries also have those same rights as American children (too life) , and if so, didn’t you strip away their rights?
Stuff everyone else is wrong about. 
I think Obama would say that of course he does deeply regret the deaths of innocent civilians that result from US drone strikes, and if there were some way in which he could equally improve/secure the safety of the US and its allies without those deaths resulting, he would of course be deeply relieved to go with it. Has he in private wept for the children who have died in US drone strikes? We cannot know. Seems possible – I mean, he seems a sensitive guy, and he doesn’t seem to have a particularly stiff upper lip. And seeing footage of grief-stricken parents is, as you more-or-less say, liable to move most people to tears. (For such reasons, your confident talk of ‘crocodile tears’, after your first two paragraphs, seems to me unfair – as well as inconsistent with those first two paragraphs. ‘I am not here to speculate whether or not he was genuinely moved to tears’ – and yet crocodile tears simply are non-genuine tears.) Surely Obama basically just thinks that more people would die and suffer if it weren’t for the drone strikes? Perhaps he is wrong about that. I don’t know. In any case, that’s a whole different argument from the one you’ve made here.
This line of yours seems to me particularly unreasonable: ‘Barack Obama doesn’t really care about the death of innocent children, just American ones and only then when they further his political agenda of gun control.’ You have given some reasons – and I hope I’ve explained why they’re not good ones – for thinking that the only children whose deaths Obama cares about are American ones, but you have given no reasons at all for thinking that he only cares about the deaths of American children insofar as those deaths present an opportunity for furthering his gun control agenda – and that seems an immense thing to say about another human being… (And again, it seems at odds with your remarks nearer the start: ‘he is, of course, only human and the murder of children would move anyone’.)
Certainly, there is some good sense in what you’ve written. The US government and Obama in particular should have been a lot more open – and openly repentant – about the deaths of innocent bystanders resulting from the drone strikes they ordered. If they believed those deaths to be a ‘necessary evil’, they should have openly made the case for that belief to the American electorate and the world at large.
Now, my final remark may seem harsh. Note that it is a remark only about how your piece struck me. (I mean perhaps I got the wrong impression; perhaps I was, in a way, inattentive in my reading. Or perhaps your sentiments were fine, but your expression of them could have been better.) After that preamble, here is the remark: it seemed to me that you were more-or-less guilty of what you were accusing Obama of. It seemed to me that you were looking to make an anti-gun-control, anti-Obama case, more than you were concerned about the child victims of drone strikes or the Sandy Hook shooting. Take a moment, please, to ask yourself whether that is true. You didn’t consider even the most obvious defense of Obama here. It seemed to me that I was reading not fair critical commentary but basically a hit piece. You ask Obama: if you truly care about the children who died at Sandy Hook, what about the children who died in the drone strikes you ordered? I might equally ask you: if you truly care about the children who die in US drone strikes, what about the children who would die if it weren’t for those US drone strikes? If you thought none would, why didn’t you explain that? I’m sure you don’t suppose that Obama ordered those drone strikes just for the fun of it. Or perhaps you wouldn’t put that past him.
Anyway, best of luck with your writing.
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Hi Benjamin and thanks for that response.
On your first point, there is a way that he can ensure safety of the American people without the drone strikes; he can just not do the drone strikes, it really is that simple. Your talk of private tears isn’t relevant here as that’s not the point of the article. I’m talking about his public displays, if the deaths from a mass shooting are such a terrible tragedy that he feels the need to cry on t.v (to push his political agenda) then why doesn’t he do the same for the children across the world that he will kill. It’s all about proximity. As I’ve said, he’ll never meet the parents whose children he thought it okay to sacrifice in Yemen or Somalia.
On the point of crocodile tears, dictionary.com defines them first and foremost as a hypocritical show of sorrow. That is the basis on which I argue. He is a hypocrite. You call my assertions immense, but I stand by them, he is a politician and has an agenda for gun control, I see it as possible and even reasonable to think he cares about the death of individuals when it suits him politically.
On your final point, I don’t really see this piece as about gun control, although it does feature (I believe the word features once) the article is about Obama’s hypocrisy and I am using his drone strike program to display that.
I’m not sure about what to think concerning your hit-piece comment or even what you really mean. If you mean to say I’m not objective then you haven’t read the name of the blog. If you think I am not being fair then please point out any factual mistakes I’ve made and I’ll correct them. You seemed to be criticising me for being anti-Obama, if so I unapologetically plead guilty, but is that really a problem? On your final point, again, I think you have missed the point, this is far more about his hypocrisy than guns control or drone strikes (to reiterate, I am using his drone strike policy to show his hypocrisy)
thanks again.
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Hi Zach. I could have been a bit clearer with that initial response…
I hope some of this now is helpful…
POINT ONE
You say it’s hypocrital of Obama to publically cry over the deaths of children in school massacres in US, but not over the deaths of children in his drone attacks in the Middle East.
‘if the deaths from a mass shooting are such a terrible tragedy that he feels the need to cry on t.v (to push his political agenda) then why doesn’t he do the same for the children across the world that he will kill.’
I say:
1) Suppose he thinks – perhaps wrongly – that the deaths from the drone strikes are a necessary evil, but the deaths from the shooting are utterly senseless. Senseless pain and deaths typically make people more upset than do pain and deaths that they believe are necessary to achieve very important moral ends.
2) Suppose he has cried about the child victims of drone attacks in private, but thinks – again, perhaps wrongly – that he has good reasons for not expressing this particular grief publicly. Suppose, for instance, that he fears doing so would draw a lot of attention to the collateral damage of the drone strikes, which would harm his country’s and his government’s reputation and diplomatic efforts and so on, or would inspire strong public opposition to the drone strikes, or would undermine morale in the military, or would help the IS recruitment drive, and that he’d then have a very difficult or impossible job in trying prevent or address these negative consequences by explaining the tragic need there is to risk this kind of collateral damage. Whereas there are no negatives consequences that being open about his pain could have in the Sandy Hook case.
3) Suppose he just does care about American children more than foreign children, and thinks – as ever, perhaps wrongly – that this is good and right and natural. Americans are his people, his compatriots. He was the elected leader of them and only them. Suppose he cares about American kids more than Arabic kids in a way similar to that in which you presumably care about your family more than a random nomadic tribe in Mongolia.
Now, if any of these three things are true, he is not being hypocritical in publically crying about the Sandy Hook kids but not about the drone strike kids. And quite possibly all three are true, to varying degrees.
POINT TWO
‘On your first point, there is a way that he can ensure safety of the American people without the drone strikes; he can just not do the drone strikes, it really is that simple.’
Isn’t it worth saying why you think the American people (and the people of allied countries) would be safer if the US government did not order the drone strikes? Maybe that’s right, but it’s certainly not obvious that it is. In your piece, you didn’t even make the claim. And the US government has seemed convinced of the opposite for a quite a while now, over two administrations with very different ideologies.
POINT THREE
I repeat, you have said nothing in support of the view that he’s crying only to push an anti-gun agenda. Literally nothing at all.
Even accepting every other claim you’ve made, I could still wonder: maybe the only kids he really cares about are American ones? Or maybe he only really cares about seeming a kind, caring, soulful, generally awesome guy himself, and he pretends to care about gun control just as he pretends to care about massacred school kids?
More seriously, why would he want to push an anti-gun agenda if he’s not seriously upset by these massacres? I’m not saying there aren’t other possible reasons, but surely this is by far the most obvious and likely one. I repeat your line: ‘he is, of course, only human and the murder of children would move anyone’.
POINT FOUR
The definition of ‘crocodile tears’ you cite – OK, fair enough. I was unfamiliar with that definition.
Still, you do seem to imply in your piece, and still here in your answers to my response, that his tears were non-genuine, despite saying explicitly at the start of your piece that you’re not going to speculate on whether they’re genuine or not. (You wrote in the piece and you repeat here that he doesn’t care about the kids except as a means to advance his gun control agenda. You now say he ‘felt the need to cry’ on those televised occasions… When I cry, it’s not because I ‘feel the need to’. I can’t really help myself. I have in some situations felt that I should cry, and never had any ability to make myself, in those situations or any others. Maybe it’s different with him. We can’t know.)
POINT FIVE
Sure, the piece is a lot more anti-Obama than it is anti-gun control. I should have described the piece as ‘an anti-Obama, anti-gun-control case’, rather than ‘an anti-gun-control, anti-Obama case’. I didn’t think about my word ordering there. But my impression was that you are criticising Obama for advancing a gun control agenda, even if you’re primarily criticising him for doing so in a hypocritical way. Maybe the title of your other piece, which I haven’t read beyond the very start, influenced that impression.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly think there are many good reasons to criticise Obama.
Do you want to convince people at all with your blog? Or aid and stimulate their thinking as much as possible? Or contribute to debates that you can also learn from?
If you’d answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, probably you’d be better off writing in a fair way, trying to be objective, mentioning and assessing the counterarguments you can think of or find.
If really the blog is just about getting some satisfaction from letting out bile, and putting in writing the ways in which you consider yourself to be intellectually superior, go ahead writing pieces like this one.
Having said that, one other reason occurs to me for in this case trying to be fair and consider the counterarguments. Namely, Obama is a human being. And so surely deserves the basic respect that any human being does. If someone were publically assessing your moral character on the basis of some observations they’d made of you, you’d presumably want them to be fair and to mention and seriously consider any defence you might want to offer.
God, I’ve written an awful lot… Sorry. As said, I hope it’s helpful.
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Ok thanks Benjamin but I need to reply.
1) There’s no supposing here, of course he believes that the drone strikes are a necessary evil, this still doesn’t mean he’s not a hypocrite when he is fine with killing children abroad, but its a such a tragedy that he publicly cries here. I can imagine that the parents of those children from Yemen or Pakistan that were killed would wholeheartedly agree with me that Obama is a complete hypocrite when he cries for American children that he had never met but defends the (in some cases) purposeful sacrificing of children abroad.
Yes, I’m sure he told himself that he shouldn’t cry in public about drone strikes, but isn’t that quite interesting that he should care more about diplomatic efforts or his reputation than the truth about what is tantamount to terrorism. Doesn’t truth matter more. This still doesn’t mean he isn’t a hypocrite.
You mention ‘…no negatives consequences that being open about his pain could have in the Sandy Hook case’. I couldn’t disagree with you more. The negative consequences are the undermining of the second amendment; attacking the constitutional rights of Americans. We cannot separate his pain and his political agenda in that mass shooting.
On point three I think your logic is pretty misguided. Of course I care about the death of my family over a tribe in Mongolia, however I would be a hypocrite if whilst being upset over my family, I thought it fine to bomb a children’s nursery. Obama is distraught over the random death of children but purposefully bombs other children. These are NOT two sets of random deaths, one is on purpose, by him.
2) I really thought that would be obvious; but maybe you favour a utilitarian way of looking at these things, I do not. I’ll leave it like this. What if some future administration, carried on Obama’s idea that he can fly over any country he wants and carry out ‘targetted strikes’, in the UK. There is some terrible evil madman in the village in which you live (or area of a city). Given your apparent defence of Obama here, you’d be fine with a drone flying over your street and killing your family right? It makes America safer right? All for the greater good? I think not.
3) Actually Benjamin, nowhere do I say that he is only crying to push his gun control agenda. What I said was that he is still a politician with an agenda and is using those tears to push it. Maybe those tears are genuine, no one can know. Even if he cried after the mass shooting would he really cry again some time later on tv? Who knows.
5) I still disagree entirely. This is not a gun control piece and your word ordering really isn’t the point. And as for the comments about the blog I can only really say this, if the tone upsets you don’t read it. These are arguments I’m making about serious topics, there’s no bile here. If you believe the tone is one of intellectually superiority well there’s nothing I can do I’m afraid.
thanks.
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You feel that my thinking is misguided (and probably clumsy and biased) and that I have basically missed all of your points. I feel that your thinking is misguided (and clumsy and biased) and that you have basically missed all of my points.
I suspect this would continue to be the case if we continued with this conversation, at least that for a long time it would.
(A very incisive impartial arbiter, respected by both of us, would be handy.)
But you have pushed me to clarify my thinking a little bit, and for that I thank you.
I hope (but don’t presume) I’ve done the same for you.
All the best.
Actually, (I do get some enjoyment from even quite bad debates, and) I can’t resist one final comment (which I expect won’t win you over, but one never knows). The simple fact that someone intentionally hurts some people but not others (or mourns some people but not others) doesn’t automatically make them a hypocrite. Right? (Maybe check out the dictionary.com definitions of ‘hypocrite’.) If that someone condemns ALL intentional hurting of people, and then does intentionally hurt some people, then he’s a hypocrite, for sure. But that’s different. Has Obama said there are never any circumstances in which it’s right to risk killing children, or all children horribly killed should be equally mourned in public by the president of the US, or anything similar and no less absolute?
So my thought: maybe you’re right to condemn Obama here, just not as a hypocrite. Maybe Obama is not being hypocritical here – he’s being wrong and evil in some other way. I’m not saying that’s true. But it’s possible. I don’t know. I mean, many of the most evil people in history have not really been hypocrites. They have absolutely practised what they’ve preached. Nevertheless, they’ve been terrible people. (And actually there could, in theory, be very hypocritical people who are not really evil. Someone might, in theory, do very kind things despite claiming he won’t and shouldn’t – something like that… Yeah, a philosophical thought to end on.)
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We’ll end it there. I’ve enjoyed it anyway.
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