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| President Obama and advisors monitoring the Abottabad operation in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. |
About killing Osama bin Laden: I am still not sorry the son of a bitch is dead. In fact, we have a saying down south here that applies richly to Bin Laden: killing is too good for him. At the very least, a long, slow rot in prison would have been even more deserved, from a certain point of view. Rudolf Hess got such a punishment for doing a whole lot less.
However, as more details and circumstances have come to light, and I really hate to say this fellas, it is sounding more and more like a knuckle-headed Bush/Cheney operation than something I might have expected our very smart, very sharp President - and the also smart, sharp team around him, such as Hillary and Biden, etc. - to have countenanced.
Specifically, I find myself wondering now:
1. Was it really necessary to blow the bastard away in front of his
2. There are some mumbling efforts to justify the killing that turn on the testimony of our forces that Bin Laden was unarmed but somehow "resisting" when confronted. Um, but this strikes me as a silly misuse of language at best, and a dangerously Bush-Cheney-like manipulation at worst. I mean really, guys - if a screaming somebody with a weapon busted down your bedroom door at 1 a.m. on a moonless night, what would you do? Any human being, crook or straight, would have "resisted" - no? So that's not a justification for anything that might need justifying, but a propaganda trick. Typical of the last Administration, but not worthy of us, I don't think.
3. Was there really absolutely no freaking way to grab the son of a bitch alive and bring him before an international court of justice? Really? Well, he was undercover, holed up deep inside Pakistan . . . yeah, so we couldn't put the screws on the Pakis big time and extradite him?
4. It is a deep but persistent flaw in human nature to idolize dead criminals, no matter how many women and children they killed or how much they stole or who they hurt: e.g., Napoleon, Jesse James, D. B. Cooper, etc., etc., etc. Even without a body, now he becomes the stuff of legend - even among people (not Americans) who suffered on account of what all he did.
5. I know about the Muslim burial rules and all, but even so - in this one very, very special instance, instead of being so quick to observe the niceties of religion, couldn't we have held onto the body for a few days to allow an international team of doctors, diplomats, and journalists to thoroughly examine and verify that the corpse was indeed Bin Laden's?
So all in all, as strongly as I feel that justice was indeed served to a cold-blooded, merciless killer of thousands of innocents - still, who thought all this through? Did anyone?
Or is Dick Cheney still running the show, from an undisclosed location? I'm just sayin'. . . .
P.S. - The President will visit Ground Zero this afternoon, meet survivors and responders, and lay a wreath. Headlines are already referring to it as "milking" the assassination. I don't think that's what he's doing but you see how it looks in certain quarters.
Jeezus, fellas, sometimes I just get really, really tired of thinking about the world and all the brutality and assininity of it, ya know what I mean?
