Turkish family slaughtered in Syrian mortar attack

If you follow the news at all you're familiar with that story and the various follow-ups about Turkey striking back and Erdogan's bellicose comments about how the Syrians are risking all-out war etc.

You're familiar with it because Turkey is a fellow NATO nation and therefore by definition the "good guy" in anything that transpires between the two counties. Our media love a simplistic good-guys bad-guys scenario because it makes few demands on the reader, or more generally the "news consumer."

In the reportage on this incident in the Western media you will be spared any unnecessary background that might confuse your thinking about who is who in the good-bad matrix. You won't be challenged to ask questions about Turkey's arming and training of the armed rebels now in control of the Syrian insurrection, or their willful complicity in infiltrating these rebels into the country and also providing them safe haven in Turkey, all of which are strictly illegal under international law.

All you need to know is NATO good, Syria bad.

But even if you do follow the news quite closely, you may have missed the story about the report put out by a research team from Stanford and NYU called "Living under drones" which came out a few days before that unlucky Turkish family was annihilated.

That's because the people operating those drones are from the Nations of Virtue and the people living under them are in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and various other benighted lands not quite safe for democracy yet.

And a family of five blown to bits is nothing! Small potatoes! A mere blip! Our drone program does it up right! Nevermind this nonsense about a family of five over 18 months. We do that at least once a week!

Sometimes twice a day!

We've even come up with a new twist wherein we send in a Hellfire missile, and then while the rest of the village is busy trying to dig the victims out of the rubble, we pop 'em with a second and even sometimes a third Hellfire!

You do have to admire the creativity of our war-makers, don't you?

Now technically, all these victims are terrorists unless they can prove otherwise. That's official Obama drone protocol.

According to the researches at Stanford/NYU, less than two percent of drone attack victims are legitimate targets. That's a lot of collateral damage.

That's a lot of grieving friends and family and neighbors and relatives who, if they loved us, don't any more, and if they were indifferent, now hate us, and if they already hated us, now hate us even more.

But remember, we are the good guys, and they hate us for our freedoms.