Paul Constant, The Stranger, Seattle, 04 May 2011:
If a Republican were in office right now, Osama bin Laden would still be in his compound, burning trash and slowly dying of old age. The Republican pundits who credit George W. Bush for Bin Laden’s death are peddling 100 percent bullshit. Bush, you might remember, wasn’t even looking in the right country. Not that he cared much about finding Bin Laden anyway. In a press conference on March 13, 2002, Bush said: “I don’t know where [Bin Laden] is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him… to be honest with you… I truly am not that concerned about him.” Six years later, in a July 2008 interview, Larry King asked then presidential candidate John McCain whether he would send U.S. troops into Pakistan "if you knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan." McCain said, "I'm not going to go there and here's why: because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.”
Obama never even told Pakistan we were coming.
Now Obama’s potential rivals for 2012 are struggling to figure out how to deal with the moment. Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann didn’t even mention the office of the president in their tersely worded press releases. Mitt Romney dropped the president’s title—but not his name—in what amounted to a halfhearted mumble at the end of a sentence. Only two deigned to mention the president by name: the boring former governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, and poor, bitch-slapped Donald Trump, who praised his better to the skies for a “job well done.”
.... Pundits had been complaining that Obama provided no coherent foreign policy or national defense strategy, that he was simply operating on a meeker version of the dunderheaded Bush doctrine. After last weekend, the Obama doctrine is becoming clearer. In sum: Don’t be an incompetent motherfucker. It’s going to be hard for any Republican to argue with that, but you can be sure that they’re gonna try.
http://www.thestranger.com/...
In a vain search for closure after the 30 April sortie in Abbottabad, Pakistan, I was obliged to travel to UDub (UW Seattle not Madison) to consult with a sports doc on the damage done to a knee and two ankles while sliding out of a stealth MH-60 helicopter.
It, the sortie, was brilliantly executed in many ways top to bottom and back up and laterally but the triumph of the moment turned into sawdust in my mouth as I considered the ramifications of shooting down an unarmed man.
At the same time, one must conclude that President Obama is chillingly efficient in neutralizing things.
I could not celebrate bin Laden's death. It was very sad that it had to come to that.
The deed is done and it is probably very well that it was done, it's just that a number of things about it ... the symbolic use of Geronimo for example among other things ... triumph into sawdust.
As I morosely hobbled up and down University Way, I noticed the ironic posting of a new horror flick, Hobo with a Shotgun. Jaysus Kerist! the poster looks like a Freddie Krueger reprise -- but the shotgun-toting hobo appears to play heroically, "A homeless vigilante blows away crooked cops, pedophile Santas, and other scumbags with his trusty pump-action shotgun..."
Strange times.
Constant concludes in The Stranger:
There will always be people gullible enough to eat whatever plate of horseshit the Republican media will feed them, of course. And some people are racist enough to deny any accomplishment to a successful black president, no matter how tortured the logic gets. But when Obama successfully nabbed Bin Laden, he sapped the power from the scary campfire stories that Republicans tell. It marked the end of a very particular war of terror perpetrated against America over the last 10 years.
Um, I'll skip the horseshit, thank you. It's the sawdust taste....
Postscript:
ABBOTABAD, Pakistan — Osama bin Laden's young daughter has told Pakistani officials that she saw her father shot and killed by armed Americans when they raided a house here early Monday, an official with Pakistan's spy agency said Tuesday.
The official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the daughter, whom he described as being 12 or 13 years old, was one of eight or nine children in the house when a team of U.S. Navy SEALs stormed the complex by helicopter.
"We have no independent confirmation of Osama bin Laden being there or dying there except what we got from the daughter," said the official, a member of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
Postscript II:
Oh Jaysus Kerist! Pretentious sheistkopf Marc A. Thiessen has the shamelessness and indecency to spin torture as "high-value interrogation":
On his second day in office, Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. His Justice Department then reopened criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators — inquiries that had been closed years before by career prosecutors who concluded that there were no crimes to prosecute. In a speech at the National Archives, Obama eviscerated the men and women of the CIA, accusing them of “torture” and declaring that their work “did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them.”
Now, it turns out that the very CIA interrogators whose lives Obama turned upside down played a critical role in what the president rightly calls “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.”
It is time for a public apology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I've already stated that Thiessen has no shame or sense of decency so it's no longer necessary to echo those historical words:
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?