Only Assassination Talk That’s News is Kind That Targets Elites

What public discussion of political assassination merits wall to wall news coverage?

The past week showed that when the target of the language is a person of power in the US, that requires exhaustive reporting. When the targets are the thousands and counting victims of the Obama drone war, not so much.

Donald Trump hopes someone shoots Hillary Clinton. It’s not so much of a gaffe as a statement of fact. She’s been wiping the floor with him in the polls lately.

For someone like the Republican nominee, a woman annihilating his popularity in public must be exceptionally terrible. So the candidate’s comment on Tuesday were unsurprising. From CNN:

“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” Trump said.

Yeah, maybe there is. Who knows what it could be?

The story has dominated news coverage for the past hours since the candidate said it.

It’s a disturbing message of political assassination, that’s for sure. But it’s hardly the most disturbing of those messages to come to light recently, though you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media.

I’m referring, of course, to the ACLU’s release of the Obama administration’s “Presidential Policy Guidance,” or PPG, on extrajudicial drone assassinations of suspected terrorists.

The PPG was released on Friday as part of a larger document dump from the federal government in response to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information request for the information.

The PPG is an unambiguous (unlike Trump’s statement) call for political assassination, and, as Brett Max Kaufman of the ACLU said on the organization’s post about the papers Monday:

[The] PPG’s length and numbingly bureaucratic tone make clear just how normalized the killing of terrorism suspects far from any battlefield has become inside the executive branch. Under the Constitution and international law, these kinds of strikes are supposed to be — at best — exceptional and rare. The “playbook” belies that background, giving off the sense that these matters are business as usual.

The document’s emphasis on process, rather than on an elaboration of its legal standards for conducting targeted killings, obscures yet another, long-running criticism of the program: That for all the layers of internal decision making by government agencies, no court has any role in checking their work.

Yes, drone assassinations, which are known for the large amount of collateral damage they leave in their wake- when they even get the target right- have become so routine there are officious memos being composed and circulated about them in the White House. But that’s not a news story.

The lives snuffed out by the document aren’t important lives, like Clinton’s. Rather, they are the lives of the people who will be in her path when she takes the oath of office in January of 2017.

That the media and the country is hand-wringingly obsessed with one threat of assassination and not with the other should tell you all you need to know about the country’s priorities in the 21st century.