Book: Obama Claimed to Be 'Really Good at Killing People'

A new book on the 2012 election has President Obama making a rather brutal claim, particularly, as Michael Kelley notes at Business Insider, for a Nobel Peace laureate: The president said to aides that he's "really good at killing people." The quote comes from Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, and it's mentioned briefly in Peter Hamby's Washington Post review. (Hamby gives it as an example of the book having "click-bait aplenty.") Kelley, for his part, observes that Obama's comment is quite accurate.

While there were 52 total drone strikes while George W. Bush was president, Obama's administration has overseen 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and some in Somalia. That's on top of the surge in Afghanistan, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes during NATO's Libya mission in 2011; Business Insider has even more examples. Click for more tidbits from the Game Change sequel. (More President Obama stories.)