On the latest “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver looked into how Americans have come to widely accept President Obama’s growing reliance on drone strikes, while knowing little to nothing about the administration’s rules for using them.
“Because our rules for drone strikes are a little like Harvey Keitel’s balls: We’ve all seen them in ‘The Piano,’ ‘Bad Lieutenant, or on SnapChat. And from, from a distance you think, ‘Well, I understand the contours of those.’ But if you were to really examine them, you’d discover that they’re actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and grey areas. Much like the rules for our drone strikes.”
The comparison, which Oliver says has contributed to defining Obama’s presidency as much as Obamacare and “receiving racist emails from distant relatives,” perfectly illustrates just how little both the public and the administration knows exactly who and how many we’re going about killing with such strikes — strikes that have waged on despite the continued lack of answers Obama seems quite intent on never sufficiently explaining to us.
“That is a little disturbing. Because the question ‘how many people have you’ve killed in drone strikes’ is not one of those questions where it’s okay to say you don’t know. It’s not like asking someone ‘who was the voice of Disney’s Aladdin’ or ‘what are Skittles are made from.’ It’s different…And the crazy thing is it’s literally always been like this.”
