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Joe Scarborough expressed discomfort on Tuesday with President Obama's newly revealed "kill list" of alleged Al Qaeda suspects.
The New York Times ran a lengthy story about Obama's intimate involvement in personally deciding which people should go on the list of targets for drone strikes. The opening scene of the story showed Obama choosing whether or not to target two teenagers, "including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years."
On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," Scarborough said that the story made him "flinch." He wondered whether it was right for the president to be so personally implicated in such choices. "Something to me is just not right about taking that into the Oval Office," he said.
The other panelists all seemed to be fine with Obama's participation, saying that it showed a willingness to confront the realities of his decisions.
Scarborough still seemed uneasy:
I just wonder, ten years from now, what we're going to be saying about a president lining up pictures of teenagers in the Oval Office and picking. I'm not talking the morality of doing it or not doing it, I'm just talking about whether it should be kept away from the president, away from the White House. And you stack that on top of us launching drone attacks in countries where we haven't even declared war? There are going to be some searing critiques a decade from now about our overreach.
"There could be critiques of a president who was disconnected as well and did not choose to look and did not choose think about every angle, including the moral choice," Brzezinski said. "Don't you think?"
"No," Scarborough replied. "I don't. I think there are a lot of people that are going to spin for Barack Obama ... I think you're going to have a lot of liberal hand-wringing."
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