Other people have compared this to George W. Bush's joke about missing weapons of mass destruction, but I think this is sort of irrelevant. The American people have really refused to cope with the human cost of using drone attacks against suspected terrorists because for the most part, as long as we feel "safe," we're indifferent to what the government does in the name of security. The president joking about drones just further justifies that numbness, and it's inappropriate even without the comparison.

I suppose the relative lack of outrage has to do with whose lives were the butt of the joke -- we recognize the names and faces of the American service members who died because of Bush's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction as friends, relatives, and family members. The people who die in drone strikes are anonymous -- they have no faces or names -- except for the suspected terrorist targets the administration celebrates as being neutralized.