The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...and all the troubling ethical issues disappear.

Obama lawyers who okayed Awlaki drone order criticized Bush's use of presidential war powers:

Not the first time that the left’s anti-war legal heroes have morphed from civil libertarians when Bush was in office to war-power expansionists once they went to work for The One. Remember when Harold Koh convinced Obama that he didn’t need to bother with congressional authorization after all if he wanted to wage war in Libya? Good times.


The latest converts to the church of It’s Okay When We Do It: OLC lawyers David Barron and Martin Lederman, who, it turns out, co-authored the legal memo last summer arguing that the killing of Awlaki was legal, notwithstanding the fact that he was an American citizen.

And:
 

This wasn’t the first piece of scholarship Barron and Lederman wrote together. Turns out they also co-authored a pair of articles in the Harvard Law Review three years ago arguing that constitutional war powers had tipped too much towards the executive and away from Congress over the years. That’s not the same issue as was raised in the Awlaki case, but insofar as those articles were part of the left’s broader argument for limiting the president’s ability to wage war wherever and however he likes, the Awlaki memo is obviously a terrible betrayal. No wonder Glenn Greenwald is heartbroken. Apparently, so scrupulous was the by-the-book Obama OLC about targeting Americans that they gave the okay to hit Awlaki before they’d even done the research into whether it was legal.

"The latest converts to the church of It’s Okay When We Do It"...what a great line.