Eight years to the day after George Bush appeared on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced “Mission Accomplished,” it’s being reported that Osama bin Laden has been killed by the CIA in Pakistan. “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted action,” said the President… I want to say something thoughtful, acknowledging the suffering of all of those people who were left without their loved ones in the wake of 9/11, but it’s late, and over a decade has passed since the attacks. I’m ashamed to say it, but all that comes to mind at the moment is that this caps a pretty good week for Obama. And my guess is that I’m not alone. Had this happened a year or so after the attacks, I think there would have been parades in the streets of every town in America. Now, though, it’s just another news story. It’s weird how time changes things.
update: Word is that we have his body. One wonders what we’ll do with it.
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Word is that the news bumped The Apprentice from tonight’s television lineup.
I will never forgive Obama for turning what should be a great night for all Americans into a cheap moment of political theater.
Yea, flying in on that F-18 and putting up a “mission accomplished” banner on our largest aircraft carrier was just too much. Obama could have made a brief address thanking our military and praising American values. Oh wait…
Moron.
How dare the commander in chief take credit for his actions, the audacity of this president.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Watching Al Jazeera.
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
And people are celebrating outside the Whitehouse.
Amen Man O Man! And for those that don’t read history Samuel Johnson’s meaning is known to be that self interested people will make a false appeal to patriotism to protect their illegitimate control. Obama is now desperately trying to play the “patriot card” by suddenly on cue producing the body of Osama. He is playing the patriot. You are SO right that he is a scoundrel, a fraud a fake.
What would you have done differently?
Completely unrelated, but whatever happened to No Face?
word is he will be handled with proper islamic tradition and buried out to sea.
“Bin Laden’s body was taken to Afghanistan and buried at sea.”
“buried at sea” is a polite way to say they threw his body into the ocean because they didn’t want his burial place to become a shrine.
I turned on Fox News this morning and they were talking about immigration while all the other stations were covering the assassination. I found that interesting. Whne they do talk about it, my guess is that they’ll criticize the President for not bringing him back alive to be interrogated.
As for the burial at sea, it’s a good story, but I doubt it. I think Obama and Bush would want to see him first.
Obama can’t win no matter what he does based on some of the comments here… You would think he was appointed president by the Supreme Court or something….
Peter, I think the answer is obvious. He entered the portal and was found worthy.
http://markmaynard.com/?p=13486
Obama worked out a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, and they handed over bin Laden. In exchange for bin Laden’s head, he’s allowing them to run the American public school system, and sending them a freighter full of young blond girls.
In most of the footage I’ve seen of people celebrating, it’s been what appear to be young, drunk college kids. I’m sure I’ll get some shit for this, but I don’t like the chanting and shouting. I think this should be a time for reflection, not jingoism.
In media time, the election is a lifetime away. George H.W. Bush was guaranteed re-election after the Desert storm victory too. You would think this would do the trick, but the spin has only begun. And all the dead Muslim extremists in the world won’t mean shit if the unemployment numbers aren’t five points better and gas is five bucks a gallon.
From Free Republic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2713605/posts
“Burial at sea” was the word from the NY Times, which I assume means that someone tripped as they were loading his body to be sent back to the US & dumped him overboard by mistake.
Also this Boy O Boy character sure has a boring life if he considers a 10 minute speech at 11:30pm “political theater”.
From a guy claiming to be a historian on Reddit. I don’t agree with much of it, but I thought that it might be good for generating conversation on the resulting outcomes of last night’s news:
In no way am I trying to taint this day with politics; what follows is my assessment on its impact on our politics as a historian, and not as a liberal Democrat.
I recognize that some of these are a stretch.
EDIT: I certainly do not suggest that all of these outcomes are inevitable; I suggest that they are either possible, probably, or likely. I cannot predict the future, but the past is a good guide in instances such as these.
EDIT 2: And of course, some of these depend on if and in what way the President chooses to capitalize on this event. He may choose not to in any significant way.
Edit 3 – I find this interesting: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54070.html
1. Very few people will profess that President Obama is not an American citizen after today. The percentage of those who believe that particular myth will fall.
2. President Obama’s popularity will skyrocket for a short period, and probably settle back down in the low 60s. If unemployment continues to fall, he will probably stay there through the election.
3. The Republican Party is finished for the short term. It may well split. They have spent the last 3 years calling Obama every vile name in the book, and virtually no one is going to want to hear that now, at least in the short term. They have boxed themselves in by using such extremist language about the President that they cannot now climb back down from it in order to soak up some goodwill.
4. Palin, Gingrich, Trump, and Bachmann are all finished.
5. Some prominent names floated for the Republican Presidential Nomination will drop out of the race (or never enter it), because under most circumstances none of those currently mentioned can now defeat Obama, unless something terrible happens before the election.
6. Fox “News” will try to carry on the fight, but fewer people will be in the mood for its viciousness.
7. Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is dead. Obama will now have tremendous leverage in putting together a less insane budget.
8. President Obama’s life is now in real mortal danger. The powers that be now realize they cannot, under most circumstances, defeat him in 2012 at the ballot box. I am certain we will see at least one attempt.
9. The mood of the nation will start to improve. While this does not change certain economic facts (the debt, etc.), a change in mood could have a tremendous impact on the nation. We really needed a win, and we just got one. People will start to feel better, at least in the short term. Again, that doesn’t change some things, but we just suffered through a bitter, humiliating decade and this will go a long way to lifting the nation’s spirits and hopefully return some rationality to our political debates.
10. Obama will lead the Democrats to a smashing victory in 2012. The Democratic Party will continually remind everyone that Obama is the one who killed him, and not Bush. The Republicans will be unable to attack him with the same amount of rage and vitriol, and therefore will not be able to use fear and hatred to attract votes as they have done since 2001.
11. The calls to speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan will grow.
12. The calls to cut defense spending will grow, as will the movement to tax the rich instead of cut services. Obama will come out strong in favor of the latter, if not the former.
13. The fact that Obama is now a hero will energize the left in this country after a long sleep. Democrats now have their Ronald Reagan.
14. Much of press will now move even more into the Obama camp; this means that many will be less willing to tolerate the irrational attacks on the President (and most of the attacks are irrational) because the viewing public won’t be in the mood to hear it.
15. The Republican Party may well now nominate former Governor Tim Pawlenty because he has not been out there saying terrible things about Obama, but is a conservative. I can’t think of anyone else that fits that bill (but I well may).
16. Conspiracy theories will pop up that this is a fraud, but few people will buy into it. These will be the “death certificate-ers.” If it is a fraud, why release the news at 11:00 on a Sunday night a year and a half before the election? Why not release it next October?
17. The Republicans have spent an entire decade waving this bloody flag, and President Obama just took it away from them. He promised to make bin Laden’s capture a top priority, and he fulfilled that promise. Suddenly a lot of other things he supports are going to make sense to more people.
18. Some or all of these predictions depend upon the notion that there will be no major terrorist attack between now and the 2012 elections, or some other national emergency or tragedy for which President Obama would have to take a share of the blame.
19. There will always be people who don’t like, and always be people who continue their irrational and rather obsessive hatred for him. But I think that the percentage of those people will fall. Thus everyone who built there reputation on hating Obama will suffer, because fewer people will be in the mood to hate him with such passion. No matter what, he will always be “the guy who got bin Laden.”
20. Americans love to back a winner. This has been proven many times over. Obama is now a winner, and a certain percentage of the population will shift to his side, even if they don’t fully understand why. People like to back winners because it makes them feel like they themselves are winners. (Think about how passionate people can be about their sports teams. Why are the Yankees popular? Because they win. It certainly isn’t because they a bunch of good people. But they win and so people like them.)
In 1981, 2 months after taking office, President Ronald Reagan’s popular support had begun to fall. The recession didn’t seem to be getting better. Reagan had proposed a rather radical budget that slashed social spending and taxes, and the Democrats who controlled Congress were not interested. Then, in March, a young man obsessed with Jodi Foster named John Hinkley tried to assassinate Reagan.
As the oldest person ever elected, it didn’t seem likely that he’d survive. But he did. And he was back on the job fairly quickly. His popularity skyrocketed, and the Democrats in Congress caved in and voted for his irrational budget. Reaganomics was born out of the assassination attempt as much as the minds of willfully ignorant economists.
The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the US military, on the promise of the President, is ten times more important (potentially) than the attempt on Reagan’s life. Why? Because bin Laden gave us a black eye, if you take my meaning. Not only did he murder our fellow Americans, he showed us to be vulnerable. This scared the American people very deeply, and we have held bitter resentment and rage against him ever since then, for both reasons. We can let that anger and rage and bitterness go now that he’s dead. Releasing that tension is incredibly significant to our road ahead. We can move on from 9/11 now, because the architect has been punished, finally, at long last, after years of disappointment and disaster. We will feel better because the person who hurt and humiliated us has now paid with his life.
Some proof: http://www.newser.com/story/117608/stocks-dollar-surge-on-bin-laden-death.html
Further proof, in a way: http://i.imgur.com/KDssc.jpg (from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/h1w7z/so_about_that_birth_certificate/ …I’m not sure how best to post either link, so here is both.)
An historic day, one of potentially deep and long-lasting significance.
News reports are revealing that the information that led to Osama Bin Ladens’ “death” was collected four years ago through interrogations at Guantanamo Bay UNDER GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENCY!
This should be a lesson for everyone who protested the methods used. I sincerely doubt that our current “administrations” soft handed methods would have ever gotten this information yet Obama gets to take the credit for the results gained from methods he opposed!
So “Boy O Boy” you are saying the Bush Administration knew Osama was living in a mansion in Abbottabad back in 2007 and did nothing about it?
I can’t believe that we thought that he was living in a cave this whole time when he was actually in a gated mansion in the suburbs. I bet he even commuted to an office in Islamabad.
And, just as you might expect, the Proofer movement is born.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/02/breitbart-bin-laden-deathers/
Have you read the “news” today Robert? The interrogations revealed the name and alias of his most trusted courier. It took intelligence some time to locate the elusive courier. The last domino fell today. They started falling as a result of Bush Era interrogations.
Here’s a link to a source I’m guessing you “trust”:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42863247/ns/world_news-death_of_bin_laden/
Really, this was just a ploy by the Obama admin to distract attention from the royal wedding.
Boy O Boy, I wouldn’t be surprised at all that torture got information which was useful. How is that a “gotcha” point on your part?
Yes as you say Robert torture is useful. Useful at least for Obamas’ “career”?!
Yes, Boy O Boy, I agree with you that the Bush Administration’s violations of the Geneva Convention will likely be a significant contributing factor (in more ways than one) to Obama’s re-election.
I have already conceded the bulk of the credit for Obama’s election in the first place to the Bush Administration and their unquestioning supporters, like yourself. You got him elected, and you appear to be well on your way to getting him re-elected.
I want to like your comment Robert
Christine Amanpour said in 2008 that he was living in a villa in Pakistan, and not a cave.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ySteY3r9I&feature=player_embedded
If you want to experience a good laugh, turn on the radio and listen to what the conservative talking heads are saying about the Obama administration’s killing of Osama bin Laden last year at this time. I caught some of Laura Ingraham’s show yesterday, and she was absolutely livid about the fact that Obama hadn’t taken the time to put on a tie before going into the situation room. That was her huge criticism. She was angry that he hadn’t taken the time to dress up. To her, this meant that he didn’t appreciate the risk that was posed to the Seal team undertaking the mission. And, at the same time, Ingraham and her ilk give Bush a pass for having allowed bin Laden to escape justice for nearly eight years, not to mention the fact that he was on vacation when he received the security brief stating that bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States, and chose not to act on the intelligence. But, Obama is worthless, it seems, because he chose not to stop on his way to the situation room and put on a tie and an American flag pin. If anything illustrates the the hypocrisy of the right, it’s this.