Ron Paul: Killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki is a 'step in the wrong direction’

I feel sick when I realize that if Bush had killed Al-Awlaki during his reign I would have high-fived him. How did we conservatives allow ourselves to come to the point where we celebrate the targeting of an American citizen for assassination.

Yes he was a despicable person and deserved to be brought to justice, and I would love to have seen him brought to justice, but where has our sense of justice gone? We use to believe in due process; a jury and a judge are supposed to be involved in that process.

Americans who commit treason are not summarily killed, they are tried in a court of law, not in the mind of the president!

If we allow the president to target those he deems despicable, you and I may find ourselves next in the crosshairs.

We use to be against nation building and now find ourselves trying to build entire regions.

We use to go to war when congress gave a declaration of war, not the UN or NATO or the president.

A man with the character of Barak Hussein Obama, and you know what I’m talking about, given this kind of latitude doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling!

Obama impeachment a possibility, says Ron Paul

Ron Paul (left) said the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki is a 'step in the wrong direction.' | AP Photos Close

By DAN HIRSCHHORN | 10/3/11 3:52 PM EDT

Ron Paul said Monday that President Barack Obama’s targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki might be an impeachable offense.

Asked at a Manchester, N.H. town hall meeting about last week’s killing of the American-born Al Qaeda leader, the Texas congressman said impeachment would be “possible,” but that he wants to know more about how the administration “flouted the law.”

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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 far 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’s stuck with the civil libertarians who’ve 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.

But he modulated a bit when asked about eliminating social welfare programs, offering a caution that he said “might be a bit too pragmatic for some.”

“I have an ideal of what we should strive for and a goal, and that would be no social services,” he said. “But for me it’s trying to work our way out of this. … I don’t argue we should drop those cold. I don’t even believe in closing down the Federal Reserve in one day.