2011/10/06

Dan Hirschhorn: Ron Paul said Monday that Barack Obama Targeted Killing Was an Impeachable Offense

Ron Paul said Monday that President Barack Obama's targeted killing of the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki might have "flouted the law." Paul called the killing a movement toward tyranny. "I put responsibility on the president because this is obviously a step in the wrong direction," Paul said. "We have just totally disrespected the Constitution." The comments once again put Paul at odds with his Republican rivals over foreign policy and the war on terror in the latest indication of how his foreign policy views stray from Republican orthodoxy even in a GOP that's taken on an increasingly isolationist bent. Candidates like Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney, who included the president in a list of people he commended in a statement released Friday, have generally been supportive of the killing. No one else in the field has spoken out against it, but Paul is stuck with the civil libertarians who have criticized the targeted killing of an American citizen without public due process. Paul, speaking at the University of New Hampshire's Manchester campus as part of a brief swing through the state, also made another pitch for eliminating the federal income tax. "If our lives and our liberty are our own, we ought to be able to keep the fruits of our labor," he said.

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