Drone

The chattering classes went into overdrive the next day on television and radio; satellite, cable, and network stations were inundated with nothing but the Myers announcement. The Christian Right was particularly incensed at the thought of “legalized marijuana,” though technically, Myers hadn’t legalized it. In fact, it had been a rather cynical ploy on her part. Every governor she had ever worked with had demanded greater state autonomy from the federal government so she was only giving them exactly what they wanted. Besides, only Colorado and Washington had legalized recreational marijuana in 2012; every other state—including liberal California—still considered it an illegal drug outside of medicinal usage.

The few liberal talk shows that were still on the air teed off on just about every other issue she raised, but the idea of targeted killings was the hammer that rang the most alarm bells for them. Those self-same moralists didn’t raise an eyebrow when President Obama had taken credit for personally selecting human beings as targets for drone strikes—including the killings of four American citizens who had been neither tried nor convicted of any crime—nor had they complained when President Clinton had thrown cruise missiles around the Horn of Africa like a wobbly drunk playing a game of darts at the King’s Head pub back in the ’90s.

Cries of another Nixonian “imperial presidency” were leveled by liberal critics for Myers’s excessive use of executive orders to bypass Congress, conveniently ignoring the over one hundred EOs issued by President Obama. They also didn’t seem to mind President Obama’s use of dozens of unelected and unapproved “czars” who issued thousands of new regulations that carried the force of law.

Conservative pundits who applauded Myers’s use of executive orders to carry out her actions, however, were screaming tyranny when President Obama had used them previously. And where were they when President Bush had issued 291 executive orders during his two terms of office? But then again, Bush was a slacker compared to Bill Clinton’s record issue of 363 executive orders. If Myers was guilty of an “imperial presidency,” it was because she stood on the shoulders of the elected emperors from both parties who preceded her.

But that was just the beginning of the debate. Hours and hours of heated exchanges about sovereignty, globalism, executive powers, free trade, the causes of drug abuse, the failings of the criminal justice system, and just about every other aspect of modern American life were discussed ad nauseam. It was a national town hall, but most of the speakers seemed to suffer from political Tourette’s syndrome.

Within days, thousands of protestors had taken to the streets in larger urban areas. The Occupy Wall Street crowd had long since lost its original focus, but the president’s announcements gave them renewed purpose. They reemerged in their disorganized glory, a collection of unhygienic malcontents, bored trust-fund kids, unemployed anthropology majors, and D-list Hollywood airheads camping out on courthouse lawns and civic-center plazas on both coasts, smoking dope and swapping STDs in bouts of equally unorganized, angry, and pointless sexual encounters.

The only problem was that the OWS types often protested against themselves. The antiglobalists and legalized-dope advocates wound up in screaming matches with the borderless-world advocates and Ivy League romantics. The anarchists protested everybody and everything, merely on principle.

But the OWS rabble was only a tiny fraction of the turnout. The Tides Foundation, the SEIU, the reorganized and rebranded ACORN radicals, and a half dozen other left-wing groups had quickly mobilized their standing armies of professional “volunteers” in “spontaneous” rallies. Hispanic protestors were conspicuously absent from these initial events.

But the radical left’s response nevertheless prompted the various Tea Party, Posse Comitatus, and Minute Man factions to rally around their respective historic flags (national, state, and Confederate), mostly in suburban and rural areas, far away from the maddening urban crowds. All in all, it was as ugly and beautiful a spectacle of free speech and free assembly democracy as anyone could have hoped for in the morally hazardous climes of the twenty-first century.

American public opinion among educated people was strongly uncertain on the whole affair. Myers enjoyed incredible pluralities of public support for specific aspects of her announcements, but there was no clear majority that favored all of her actions. Two fault lines fractured public opinion: the need for security versus the protection of civil liberties. Most valued both, but not equally, especially when they were in conflict.