My point is not "oh, dear, I'm a delicate victim," but rather, "I have been watching that murdering tyrant for decades because I had personal reasons for caring." Perhaps if you understood Qaddafi's direct role in multiple mass murders as well as those who have followed the details of his violent career, you'd be less annoyed at this outcome. Perhaps not, but I don't see either the Constitution or the standards of civilization as suicide pacts.
The FACT remains that we MURDERED someone.
The fact remains that people are killed in war, that's part of the point. While formally declaring war has gone out of style, Obama announced on Twitter and his FarceBook or via some such formal venue that we'd be following Europe's lead in intervening because we have no direct interests in Libya. That makes it a war, sort of, so I don't see our peripheral role (actions that allowed the rebels to capture him rather than us directly capturing him and turning him over) as murder. I also don't see killing this well-deserving thug as serving our national interests, but it's not murder in the moral sense unless all killing in war is murder.
To support that is to support vigilante justice and the total destruction of any semblance of civilization.
I do support vigilante justice - whenever the rule of law fall short of delivering lawful justice. When Christians are raped and forcibly converted to Islam and the local courts support the rapists, I support solving the problem by extra-legal means. When Americans are murdered by the tyrant who sets the laws in his country, I support hunting him down and killing him, even if that administration of justice is delayed.
The Bush administration captured a monster and turned him over to the authorities in his native land, for the administration of justice in accordance with their law. The Obama administration simply went out and murdered their “monster”.
The Bush administration turned that well-deserving monster over to a government that held a trial as a formality and then hanged him as he deserved. Obama, as inept and pathetic as he is, merely authorized remote missile firings that allowed Libya's rebels to capture and kill another monster. The difference between a formal trial with a predetermined outcome and the Libyan version does not bother me. We all know, even from Qaddafi's own words, that he was a monster who deserved to die. That is good enough for me.
Great post.