Touré (pictured above interviewing T.I.) is a fine writer — or at least he was at one point. Now he mostly spends his time as a helium-filled talking head, floating drably across MSNBC's midday airwaves. This is a pretty cushy job, seeing as you can say basically anything without anyone giving a shit since the only people watching cable news during the day are those being crushed to death by boredom in lobbies across the country. But there's a catch: when you get paid to talk in circles every day, sometimes you'll find yourself arguing a position you probably should not be arguing. And if you're stubborn enough and your argument is stupid enough — you are on cable news, after all — then you might find yourself in the center of a firestorm.
And so we come to the ballad of Touré, who today expressed his support of Barack Obama's right to kill American citizens — specifically, American citizens that have joined Al-Qaeda — via unmanned drones.
MSNBC's The Cycle erupted into a heated verbal battle over the ethicality of drone warfare on Tuesday. Co-hosts S.E. Cupp and Steve Kornacki expressed serious reservations over a memo leaked to NBC News by the Justice Department detailing the legal framework that allows for the targeting and killing of an American citizen abroad by an unmanned drone. Touré, however, found his fellow hosts' objections to be misguided, and repeatedly said he was "comfortable" with the White House's guidelines governing drone warfare.
Touré then dug deeper.
"It's hard to say, ‘let's not do things because we might radicalize other people,'" Touré said of his co-host's objections to drone strikes.
"But that was the argument under Bush," Cupp interjected.
"But when we say, ‘this person is leading Al Qaeda to do things' – as soon as you join Al Qaeda, you become an imminent threat," Touré added as his fellow hosts exploded
This continued to go on, with Touré standing his ground as his fellow panelists exhaled in exasperation around him. Then he went on Twitter and dug the hole even deeper.
He's the Commander in Chief. RT @kirstenpowers10: You are fine w the White House deciding who is guilty and who should die?
— Touré (@Toure) February 5, 2013
No. RT @mchastain81: Dear @toure. A US citizen is allowed due process no matter what they have done, even an AQ leader.
— Touré (@Toure) February 5, 2013
You'll never see the right care so much about civil liberties as when you start talking about the rights of Americans in Al Qaeda. #Weird
— Touré (@Toure) February 6, 2013
And so Touré caught the wrath of the Twittersphere, from Glenn Greenwald to Andrew Kaczynski to our own Mobutu Sese Seko. But of course, tomorrow is a new day, and someone else will be the village idiot. It probably won't be Touré, who will happily live on in the land of afternoon nothingness... until he says something beyond-the-pale once again.
[via Mediaite, image via Getty]