Caligula was able to abuse nearly every class of Roman society with impunity, until he made his personal guards angry.Obama's people forgot that the press has served as his Administration's Praetorian Guards. Someone in Obama's position must never take the love of his lackeys for granted; he should have read his Machiavelli.

Well, there always could be a global war that devastates all the other industrialized economies.  Then the USA could enjoy a return to 1950s economic conditions.

In Scenario 4, the enemy spy is actively engaged in executing a plot against the USA.  If you have to have a sniper shoot him to prevent critical information from going out on the wireless, you can.

If he's at a cafe reading a paper, you don't assassinate him.  You arrest him.

Is it proper for a police officer to shoot a suspect who is not armed or resisting arrest?

We empower police officers to use deadly force to arrest criminal suspects, either with the authority of a warrant or due to probable cause to believe that the suspect is engaged in criminal activity, so long as the suspect presents a danger to the officer.  But if the suspect is sitting on his couch at home counting his loot and doesn't have his guns handy, we expect the officer to arrest and not execute the suspect.

Even in the Civil War, if a Union patrol came upon a group of Confederate soldiers who were resting, we would expect the Union soldiers to take the Confederates prisoner rather than gun them down.

The issue isn't whether deadly force can be used to counter deadly force or deadly threat.  The issue is whether the Federal government is permitted to order the assassination of an American citizen whose past expressions, affiliations and behavior -- not his immediate, at-the-present-moment behavior -- shows him to be an enemy of the state.

"Retire, already!"

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the True Believers in the inevitability of a worldwide Socialist revolution lost their great champion.  Red China was no longer Red enough by that point, its leaders having discovered the attractions of becoming wealthy ("it is glorious to become rich").

Thus the only real challenger to the ascendancy of Western capitalism remaining was radical Islam.  Committed Leftists want to foment the great war between Islam and the West in hopes that one will vanquish the other but be so weakened that even in victory it will be left ripe for Marxist revolution.

Note that the Leftists don't care which of the two, Islam or the West, is victorious in the short run.  They figure that in the long run either one can be subverted if it is sufficiently weakened.

We have truck plazas and Wal-Marts out here now.  Don't know if those qualify, but....

Look at how a "green" energy scheme in Scotland has managed to decimate a population of an endangered species while not managing to produce much in the way of energy:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/hydro-firm-caused-hundreds-of-years-of-damage-1-2798506 

Dave, please alert us when next you're headed to the San Francisco Bay Area.

I want to throw a curveball into this discussion.

On Feb. 2, an Indiana National Guardsman who'd served in Afghanistan was gunned down in front of his mother's house in Chicago.  He was mistaken for someone else by a gang looking to exact revenge.

This came just a few days after the murder of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in Chicago, also by gang members seeking revenge for a previous shooting.

Remember what Rahm Emanuel said about gang members getting shot? 

"Chicago's street thugs are going to attack each other, they should take their fight away from innocent children.

We've got two gangbangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley. Don't touch the children of the city of Chicago."

Note that the Mayor has written off any prospect of bringing gangbangers to book for shooting each other -- which leaves them to resort to private vendetta -- which leads to bystanders and people who look like the wrong people getting killed.

If the criminal justice system writes off a segment of society, that segment will fill the justice gap in undesirable ways.

But without the lipstick, the pig doesn't get invited into polite company.

In the Third World, one can say, "That tribe disgusts me (or has something I want), so as soon as I see an advantage, I will kill them."  That's standard operating procedure.

In the First World, civilized people can't admit to themselves that they would like to kill people who are different just for the difference (or to take what they have).  But give them a scientific-sounding pretext, and suddenly "it's for the good of society" to round up those different people and slaughter them (and confiscate their property).

A present-day analogue: if you say, "You people are stupid - I ought to be in charge," people will mutter about the Constitution and their rights and freedoms.  But tell them, "Global warming will kill us all," and suddenly they're happy to concede those freedoms to the smart people.

Rwanda was just the same tribal warfare humankind has experienced from before its inception. 

Cambodia used a pseudo-science: the notion of purging "Kampuchea" of its bourgeois, intelligentsia and Lumpenproletariat classes.
But the original question is how a civilized country like 20th-century Germany - the land of Goethe, Schiller, and Bach - could decided to systematically and industrially annihilate entire races and classes of people.  We like to think that we in the First World have evolved socially (if not biologically) past the impulse for mindless violence and xenophobic genocide, but it was actually the development of eugenics as a science respected in that time and place that gave the Holocaust form and impetus.  (It did some nasty things in the USA as well.)

Ideate is a word that doesn't belong anywhere outside of a mental ward - and maybe not even there.

'Come to Jesus' moment is far too grandiose for the subject at hand.

Punch a puppy is a stupid metaphor, flavored with sadism.

Onboarding is a noun turned into a verb turned back into a noun - it's painful to see.

If one wants to understand how a Leftist ideology does indeed have a propensity to fuel extremism and violence, one should read "The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America," by Richard Ellis.

Dr. Ellis points out that a Progressive worldview that says people should be equal inevitably runs into the reality that life deals out inequality.  Movements from Abolition to feminism demand change, but when political means do not achieve that change quickly enough, the most impatient factions within those movements embrace force as a means to their desired end.  This leads to splitterism, ideological purity and purges, and can spawn violence ranging up to and including terrorism.

Forgive me if this has been mentioned above, but the Holocaust could only have happened when a reverence for science took hold in a country that hung onto its atavistic myths and tribal heritage.  The Germans long had their view of themselves as a people apart from other peoples (as did most human societies) -- and the relatively new science of genetics, coupled to the pseudo-science of eugenics, gave them a modern justification for their belief in themselves as superior to all other humans.  Further, the relatively new germ theory of disease gave them another pseudo-scientific framework for understanding how even tolerating the existence of Untermenschen was risking the health of the European body.

Alan Jay Lifton wrote The Nazi Doctors to show that it was indeed Germany's physicians who took leading roles in crafting the Final Solution, both in their eagerness to destroy (initially) the physically weak and mentally defective and in their understanding of the technology of extermination and cremation (for example, that the calories in corpses were sufficient to keep crematoria stoked without other fuel).

I know there are quite a lot of people who hold onto, let us say, antiquated notions about the Jewish people, including the idea that Jews today bear a collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ.  I think those old prejudices color the political beliefs and positions of those people.  I see that in the statements of Jimmy Carter and Pat Buchanan: they blame Jews for the turmoil in the Middle East and see the Palestinians as living proof of the perfidy and inhumanity of the Jewish people.

And I can easily believe that Chuck Hagel falls into the same category.  It's not only that he referred to a Jewish lobby rather than a pro-Israel lobby, but that he denounced Israel's defensive warfare against Hezbollah in Lebanon as a "sickening slaughter."  Note well: when Ted Cruz asked him about the "sickening slaughter" quote, Hagel did not repudiate his own use of that term but instead hemmed and hawed about whether Israel had committed war crimes in Lebanon.

(Jews like Peter Beinart who find Hagel's backing down on anti-Israel rhetoric distressing operate from the false premise that Jewish survival depends on Jewish meekness and inoffensiveness.)