The irony of Abbottabad is that if Bin Laden had just acted like one of the middle class Americans he despised, and bought a tract home in the suburbs, instead of erecting a fortification designed by Jabba the Hutt, he might be alive today. The Saudi fundamentalist was found because the CIA profiled the kind of place he’d likely live, and his citadel fit the bill.
The bigger irony: if Bin Laden were still alive, the Tea Party wouldn’t be so crestfallen. The death of the world’s most wanted terrorist and polygamist has stuck in the Tea Party’s craw like an hor d’oeuvre made of velcro. It was Obama, the alleged Frederick Engels and crypto imam from Kenya, who took out the jihadist that Reagan once called a “freedom fighter,” not George Bush, who lost focus like Forrest Gump watching a floating feather, as he wandered into Fallujah.
The Weird Sisters (and simultaneously Abbott and Costello) of the Tea Party, Bachmann and Palin, released bizarre statements, pretending Obama isn’t president and hoping that Bin Laden’s mysterious death at the hands of some unknown chief executive spells the end of “Sharia-compliant terrorism,” to use Bachmann’s felicitous phrase.
“Sharia-compliant terrorism”?
It sound like a PR ad-line that the Mercenary Industry might run in Lahore.
Other Tea Party talking heads have made similarly ambivalent, faltering statements, seemingly lost at sea as their malignant cultural fantasies sink under the weight of the unthinkable: history will now and forever record that it was President Obama who got Osama. They can’t even make fun of his name anymore without looking unpatriotic, or worse – like a Pakistani intelligence officer.
This fiasco for the conservatism narrative has resulted in the Rightwing Noise Machine shifting gears with a screech and belching out a new meme: It was “enhanced-interrogation techniques” (i.e., torture) that led to Bin Laden’s belated quietus. President Obama just freeloaded on Bush’s commitment to the wonders of auto-da-fé. Fox News, ever reliable, has taken the lead in this new motif, helped along by the all-too-well-known unknowing knower, Donald Rumsfeld, who triumphantly thanked waterboarding, as bobble-headed Hannity looked on and smiled.
Never mind that the CIA issued a statement that the information that ultimately put Abbottabad on the radar scope (something about some nickname of some courier of Bin Laden) was obtained not by waterboarding at all. How many times do I have to say that conservative memes aren’t about facts and can’t be rebutted with reason; they have to be strangled like snakes on a plane. In fact because of Bush’s Star Chamber mode of dealing with 9-11, we’ll never know what information was got from whom with what techniques, which is a common flaw in the practice of hitting people with rubber hoses as an investigative method.
The countermeme is this: Bush didn’t even have the good sense to listen to his own torture victims and get Bin Laden, who lived in his compound in a garrison town of Bush’s most expensive prom date, Pakistan, for the entirety of Bush’s second term. It took a Democrat who ended waterboarding to piece together the information and help restore America’s dignity. Competence matters, which is why conservative presidents do stupid things like invade Iraq, and Democratic presidents arrange to shoot Bin Laden in the head.
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