I really like this analogy, and I'm going to steal it. It really drives the point home.
I do have to be a pedant though and point out that "fatwa" just means "legal opinion" - in common parlance, we use it to mean "death sentence" because we think of people like Salman Rushdie (whom Khomeini sentenced to death under a fatwa in 1989).
If anything, this makes it worse - at least Khomeini had to provide some legal justification for his decision[0], whereas Obama has refused to do even that.
[0] A legal justification under Islamic law, which many would agree is itself arbitrary, but that's still marginally better than "trust me, it's legal, but I'm not going to tell you why".
I was aware of that, Shia canon law is a pretty fascinating system. If you can figure out a way to keep the pithy nature of the comparison while improving the accuracy, I'm all ears.
Eschewing the rather more obvious argument that the US military's policy of unannounced drone strikes in ostensibly neutral countries could prove counter-productive, we've got this rather absurd line of argument that someone who has to all intents and purposes publicly declared war on the US, is well beyond the reach of domestic law enforcement and actively encouraging militant attacks on the US military deserves due process and a civilian trial because he was born in America.
But he's happy to endorse his fathers' proposal to reward rather less surgical strikes by dubious third party bounty hunters without any more semblance of due process, provided the alleged terrorists aren't American.
