An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

President Obama,

I urge you to reconsider your administration's extraordinary and, in my opinion, extreme position on invoking the state secrets privilege to prevent review of targeted killing of U.S. citizens.

If we have learned anything as a nation, anything at all over the last troubled decade, it is that our extensive intelligence apparatus and best functioning executive processes are not immune to even the most basic failures.

It seems to me that precisely because of the inevitability of these failures our government was and has been wisely structured with checks and balances and this is nowhere more true than in the competition between the rights of individuals and actions of the government with its overwhelming power and resources. The targeted killing policy simply discards this fundamental principle and in a stunning manner that is the most irreversible, unenlightened, anti-democratic fashion imaginable.

As a veteran or our nation’s armed forces, I clearly understand that we live in a dangerous world and that the most important of your charges as president is the safety of America’s citizens. But, again, such safety is always a competition between the rights of the individual and the actions of an overwhelmingly powerful and self-evidently failure-susceptible government. Any realistic reflection on this policy in consideration of history, politics, and our constitution can lead to no other conclusion but that it demolishes a cornerstone of our values as a nation and will ultimately have tragic consequences. Again, I urge you to reconsider.

Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome - ADKEAS

I humbly submit a new, brash, and untested hypothesis - that the existence of the tea-party, and particularly of the many tea-party enthusiasts enthusiastically embracing ideas that are patently counter to their own interests, is evidence of a heretofore unidentified chronic, devastating medical affliction: Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome (ADKEAS).