We previously discussed the unease that many of us felt with the celebrations that occurred over the killing of Bin Laden and the later use of the killing to bolster the Obama campaign. This discomfort increased recently with an Obama commercial that unfairly suggested that Governor Mitt Romney would not have ordered the operation to go forward. Just in case anyone thought that was a tasteless and baseless campaign pitch by an overzealous Obama aide, the President himself just reaffirmed that message in a press conference with the Prime Minister of Japan this afternoon. It appears that, while the Administration will again bar the release of photos to the media and the public of the operation, they are eager to drag the body of Bin Laden behind the presidential limo to every possible campaign stop.
Recently, Vice President Joe Biden called the President’s ordering the operation as the most audacious plan in 500 years — apparently dwarfing Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and a number of other minor skirmishes. The thrust of these comments is that the President was the brave one to risk the political fallout of an unsuccessful operation.
We previously saw a squabble between Bush and Obama on who can claim part of the scalp of Bin Laden. It is clear that the President has decided to abandon his promise not to engage in excessive celebration or self-aggrandizement over the killing. I suppose there is now regret in the White House that they decide to forgo the taxidermist option in favor of the ocean disposal.
In the press conference, Obama seemed eager to suggest that Romney doesn’t have the guts to kill people, even our most hated enemies.
“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and to take out bin Laden. I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. And that’s been at least my practice. I said that I would go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him–and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.
I suppose that explanation will now trigger a contest on how more willing each man is to order killings like some natural-born killer. With Obama recently claiming the right to kill citizens on his sole authority, that could be a dangerous race to the bottom. Romney is already insisting that he would have ordered the same killing.
Former and current Seal members criticized the President for using the operation in a political ad. Here is the commercial that ran in the last week:
The concerted attack appears to be based on Romney’s statement in 2007 that he believe that it was “not worth moving heaven and earth … just trying to catch one person.” That was a reasonable statement and one that many in the military appeared to agree with.
The use of the killing of Bin Laden as a campaign trophy is as unfair to Romney, unseemly of Obama, and unbecoming to the presidency. The President’s remarks this afternoon should be condemned by every citizen regardless of party affiliation.
Here is the press conference:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/04/27/maddow_romney_reassembles_the_bush_foreign_policy_team.html (Maddow: Romney Reassembles The Bush Foreign Policy Team)
izb1:
“Seriously, the point is none of us can ultimately be sure of anything.”
Yes, actually you can. You have 5 senses which allow you to perceive the world. The other thing you can be sure of is that existence exists. Otherwise you would not exist and you would not perceive existence. The fact that you can see, hear, taste, smell and touch something is evidence of existence of both you and the object of your perception.
Drop a ball off a building, I am sure it will hit the ground unless it is a big ball full of helium or has a string tied to it shorter than the building. But if the ball is filled with air and the building is on land, the ball will hit the ground when dropped. So there are many things we can be sure of.
Uncertainty is a fact of life but knowledge mitigates uncertainty. So ultimately we can be sure of anything as long as we keep learning. Everything is available to human understanding.
“A man may live long, and die at last in ignorance of many truths, which his mind was capable of knowing, and that with certainty.”
John Locke Essay on Human Understanding (bk. I, ch. II)
“By referring to Mr. Carter, the Romney campaign is trying to tie President Obama to a Democratic president considered by many to be weak on national security issues. But the comparison is somewhat strained: the military raid for which Mr. Carter is best known — the attempted 1980 rescue of hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran — was a failure, while the raid against Bin Laden was a success.
This is not the first time that the Romney campaign has invoked Mr. Carter’s name. One of Mr. Romney’s advisers, Richard Williamson, wrote last week for Foreign Policy magazine that events including North Korea’s recent test of a long-range missile “may be bringing us to a juncture at which the inexperience and incompetence of a presidency crystallizes in the public mind.”
“In short, we are approaching a Jimmy Carter moment,” wrote Mr. Williamson, a senior diplomat under several Republican presidents. “In a perilous world, this is not the kind of leadership our country needs.”
The comparison to Mr. Carter appears to be a response to the White House claim that Mr. Romney would pursue an obsolete, throwback approach to international affairs. And on Tuesday, in an effort to claim an advantage on national security, Mr. Romney will observe Bin Laden’s death by visiting a fire station in Lower Manhattan with former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, an outspoken critic of Mr. Obama’s policies in the Mideast.” New York Times
mm, you obviously missed the point completely but i can see there is no point trying to clarify.
and btw, i can personally assure you and jill that not everything the government does is a conspiracy. its only half the time. but if it makes you feel better, corporations do it all the time.
Nal, AN,
Obama better figure out who he’s courting before he asks too many to dance….. Unless you’re Greek…. Most men do not like dancing by themselves……
Osama Bin Laden Raid Wasn’t Based On CIA Torture Interrogations, Senators Say
by Dan Froomkin
Posted: 04/30/2012 5:54 pm Updated: 05/ 1/2012 2:26 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/osama-bin-laden-raid-torture_n_1465820.html
Excerpt:
“Two senators privy to classified information angrily dispute the claim by a former CIA official that the Bush administration’s coercive interrogation techniques were effective and helped locate Osama bin Laden.
Jose Rodriguez, former head of CIA clandestine services, told the Washington Post last week that he is “certain, beyond any doubt” that the techniques “approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government … shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.”
But senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in a statement on Monday they were “deeply troubled” by Rodriguez’s statements that the CIA”s “so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used many years ago were a central component of our success,” in finding the al Qaeda leader, killed by U.S. commandos in a raid in Pakistan a year ago Tuesday.
“This view is misguided and misinformed,” the senators wrote.
Feinstein’s Senate Intelligence Committee has prepared a 500-page report that, according to Reuters, concludes that records from the Bush administration fail to support claims that torture was effective in stopping any terrorist attack.”
Back during my first year of college in 1965-66, an economics professor taught us the three kinds of lies: namely, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Several years later in Southeast Asia I got to witness with my own eyes what lies, damned lies, and statistics really look like. I learned to hate this body-count bullshit four decades ago and I hate it every bit as much today. Different President, same body-count bullshit. Hence, something for the last and the current body-count bullshitter-in-chief:
“Lies, Damned Eyes, and Statistics”
I cannot speak your name for I despise
Those noises that a caring mind decries
You’ve told as many contradicted lies
As any tiny man of greater size
Your Congressmen begrudge the French their fries
And think a cheap word truth and honor buys
They dine like fatted porkers in their sties
With “freedom” grease upon their shirts and ties
They stain their fingers purple to reprise
The vote in lands your army occupies
About the world you’d rather fantasize
Than entertain a fact when it replies
You try to talk just like the other guys
And pose with flags and moms and apple pies
Yet through transparent glass the truth descries
The tawdry, tacky trade your crony plies
To nurse your pride the Pentagon supplies
Another squad of young, naive GIs
So once again today a soldier dies
The blood that soaks his clothes congeals and dries
Above his fallen form his spirit flies
At home his mother sits alone and cries
Amid the rubble piles of bodies rise
Yet still your moving mouth the truth denies
So this I say to you, sir: Damn Your Eyes!
Michael Murry, The Misfortune Teller, Copyright 2006
“… seems Obama is not the only one who holds up severed heads in an argument to prove a point.” — 1zb1
“The Tu Quoque Fallacy consists in rejecting a criticism of one’s argument or actions by accusing one’s critic or others of thinking and acting in a similar way.” T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning
I do not remember claiming that “only” President Obama” resorts to brandishing trophy corpses, or trophy severed heads, or trophy heads-on-a-pike, or trophy bodies-impaled-on-poles, or whatever grisly trophy metaphor one might wish to use. I can certainly remember the Bush administration’s yearlong orgy of exploiting the captured Saddam Hussein for propaganda purposes — everything from showing him drugged and n his underwear, to a Soviet-style show trial in a cage, to his eventual lynching by a Shiite mob. But as the quote from Professor Damer indicates, my argument against exploiting trophy cadavers or body parts does not succeed or fail because other persons do the same thing. I object to the deed, no matter who does it. And I think Professor Turley simply pointed out and objected to what President Obama has done in once again aping some of the worst “public relations”l tendencies of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
My quotes from George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” deal not with logical argumentation but vivid imagery as a means of communicating the visceral emotional impact of killing people and seeking to profit from their mute and broken bodies. Like Orwell, I do not like and will not willingly condone language that seeks to “sanitize” death and destruction so as to make both more palatable to the sheltered folks far away from the bloody mayhem. “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” said General William T. Sherman. If I could only make words reek with the stench of disemboweled corpses, I would bottle the cruel, nauseous odor and spray it in the face of the first babbling baboon I came upon agitating gleefully for the killing of some unnamed person on the other side of the globe.
I do not think better of President Obama than I think of his predecessor for doing the same objectionable thing. Nor do I think worse of President Bush than I think of his successor for doing the same objectionable thing. I would think worse of them both if they had only left something worse for me to think of them.
Jill,
“I do not understand what it is about killing that is supposed to make any president a great man. I think our citizens need to take a look into why we want a guy who brags about killing as a ‘leader.'”
I don’t understand the collective silence about the fact that we have been bombing one of the poorest countries in the world for eleven years either.
The greed of wealth and power is currently unrestrained as the war profiteers sustain their vision.
1zb1,
“[I]n the real world its okay to take satisfaction that a really really bad guy who killed tens of thousands on purpose and would have killed YOU in a second if he had the chance is dead. i can assure you, those who lost loved ones on 911 have no doubts justice was done. bringing people to justice for crimes is not the worst thing we do.”
Ignoring your paranoia and lack of understanding of the effects of our country’s foreign policy, your last sentence, “bringing people to justice for crimes is not the worst thing we do,” suggests Jill’s perspective is valid.
The lies and continuing theater are just incredible! Since it’s been documented by various credible people, bin Laden has been dead since the early 2000’s. How does Obama take credit for killing the dead guy? Oh yeah, he must continue his hypotics on his loyal mesmermized subjects – especially as a deflection from his bogus birth cetificate and the approaching “election”. How gullible does Dear Leader think we are?
I agree that President Obama has not cleaned up the unmitigated disaster left behind by “The Mayberry Machiavellis,” Sheriff Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush. This does not, however, mean that President Obama caused the Cheney/Bush disaster. Nor does it mean that another dose of the Cheney/Bush disaster would do anything other than deepen and prolong the disaster. America has simply found itself under the “leadership” of outright Republican thieves and browbeaten Democratic security guards called in to look helplessly at the open and empty vaults.
Osama bin Laden, dead or alive, has nothing to do with this economic disaster and, in any event, Saudi Arabia has a practically endless supply of replacements for him. So does America want to trust what remains of its future to more ravenous thieves or hapless, confused security guards?
Somebody invent another Osama bin Laden — quickly.
Whatever our several points of view, I think we should all refrain from taking the government’s word for what it did or did not do with Osama bin Laden’s corpse. None of us have seen this corpse, so there exists no reason to suppose that our government did anything other than fly a few helicopters into Pakistan and then return minus one of the helicopters. Reports from out of the White House contradict each other as to what actually did transpire and so I see no reason to believe anything until such time as publicly verifiable evidence becomes available. Believing government lies only encourages governments to lie more. Demanding the truth and jeering with contempt at the lack of it would probably produce more truth and fewer liars.
“I’m just wondering…. how does it feel to be completely upside down and just bass ackwards wrong about something?” — Barney Collier
I would think that you’d know the feeling better than anyone.
As I recall, former President Deputy Dubya Bush first vowed to get Osama in Laden “Dead or Alive.” He did neither, and then tried to brush off failing at his own adolescent challenge by claiming that he just didn’t care any more. Personally, I never cared much about Osama bin Laden since neither of America’s right wing parties will ever hold Saudi Arabia accountable for funding and directing Al Quada as a covert pillar of their foreign policy. But it took a truly incompetent bunch of Republicans to elevate bin Laden to mythic status while simultaneously buggering America for their Saudi Arabian business partners. .
But do not despair. Four more years of a strong Republican like President Obama and another eight years of a strong Republican like You-Know-Her and you could even see a balanced budget, permanently depressed economy, and enough dead foreigners to satisfy the right-wing Democrats — although never enough to satisfy the further-right-wing Republicans.
Thanks to corporate shills like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and with Dennis Kucinich gerrymandered out of his congressional district, America doesn’t have enough deserving “leftists” to field a baseball team.
But, hey, have you heard that President Obama did what Deputy Dubya Bush couldn’t? I know that doesn’t sound like much, but using Republicans to set the standards doesn’t leave a country with much to crow about.
“Democrats need to be as tough as JFK was (tough was a favorite Kennedy term).” — swarthmore mom
Yes. I can well remember the “tough” Kennedy team that gave us the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the doomed descent into bloody quagmire in Southeast Asia. I spent six years in the Navy and a year and a half of my life in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam, 1970-72) all because of “tough” American presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Scratch “tough” and substitute “browbeaten” and you will find yourself far nearer the truth of things.
Mike Spendell said: “When you contend with savage murderers who will kill nations for greed and destroy their own country for a few dollars more, you would have to be self destructive not to use the tools at hand. The Bush Crime Family has damned near destroyed this country in their lusts for power and wealth and yet many give no quarter to the man that inherited the mess. Is success always about “what have you done for me lately”?”
======================
I’m just wondering…. how does it feel to be completely upside down and just bass ackwards wrong about something? Here we have obama that is literally destroying America as we speak, and it will probably take a strong Republican two terms to BEGIN to fix what obama has screwed up, and you’re still crying about how you think President Bush messed things up???
I’m also trying to wrap my brain about the leftwinger’s love affair with Osama Bin Laden? Could someone explain that to me?
“how does it feel to be completely upside down and just bass ackwards wrong about something? Here we have obama that is literally destroying America as we speak, and it will probably take a strong Republican two terms to BEGIN to fix what obama has screwed up”
BC,
It feels great knowing I’m not that ignorant that I don’t understand the screwing that the Republicans have give our country under the Bushes. Republican leadership has refused to fix anything since that bad actor played at being President. Sadly, people like you appreciate being screwed “bass ackwards”
and beg for more. I say this not because the Democrats are appreciably better, but because the Republicans, your heroes, have damned near destroyed this country and its people. You conveniently forget who caused the recession and gave millions to the banks before Obama ever took office, but then I don’t think you are capable of handling more than a few simple concepts at once.
The RepubliCons needed Bin Laden, the bogeyman, in order to justify going to wars. They invaded the wrong I (as in eyeRaq) country and probably did not want to kill Osama Bin Laden because he was usefull out there. Our pals the Pakistanis knew where he was, so did the Afghanis. So, probably did Bush’Cheney. The Dems cant very well drag bin Ladens body through the street because they threw it from a plane. Perhaps what the Dems need to do is merely make fun of Donald Trump like our comedian did on tv the other night. If Mitt (as in My) Romeny a.k/a Willard (as in Willard Hotel) Romney choses some military hypster as a running mate then they can promote the Mittsters demand for 100,000 more troops, bigger navy, bigger air force. War is our future with the Mitt or the Willard or whatever he is. He was conceived at the Willard you know. We dogs know these things. Subtract 9 months from his date of birth (oh, we need his Birth Certificate) and then check the register at the Willard Hotel in DC. So, he is named after a hotel and the nickname (means My in Swedish) comes from his insurance industry supporters and the Koch Brothers. So, everything that Jonathon Turley said is true and so is everything this dog says.
MM: i’ll suppose you purposely left out the full quote from JT because it underscores his use of rhetorical and metaphorical conjecture to shape and mislead the argument… seems Obama is not the only one who holds up severed heads in an argument to prove a point.:
“[I suppose] there is now regret in the White House that they decide to forgo the taxidermist option in favor of the ocean disposal.
MM, if it was only that simple.
“… they are eager to drag the body of Bin Laden behind the presidential limo to every possible campaign stop.”
” … there is now regret in the White House that they decided to forgo the taxidermist option in favor of the ocean disposal.” — Jonathan Turley
Well done, Professor. As George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language:
“A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”
Again, Professor: very good use of evocative metaphors to assist us readers in grasping the meaning of your article. Even if you hadn’t included the excellent graphic picture of the savage proudly holding up his enemy’s severed head, I think we would still have gotten the message.
“It’s true that by explicitly bringing Romney into the ad, the Obama campaign veers from the subtle to the unnecessarily heavy-handed. Yes, Romney said the things Obama says he said in the ad, like “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
Here, however, is the issue. Since at least 1968, Democrats have traditionally been more circumspect than their Republican foes in presidential politics. The lesson of the Clinton years and of Obama’s win of both the nomination and the general election in 2008 is that Democrats need to be as tough as JFK was (tough was a favorite Kennedy term). Is the bin Laden ad fair to Romney? No, not really. But politics is not for the faint of heart.
I take what President Clinton says in the ad seriously: “Look, he knew what would happen,” Clinton says of Obama. “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden? Suppose they had been captured or killed? The downside would have been horrible. But he reasoned, ‘I cannot in good conscience do nothing.’ He took the harder, more honorable path and the one that produced, in my opinion, the more honorable and best result.”
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/04/30/why-obama-owns-bin-laden/?iid=op-main-lede?xid%3Dgonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true#ixzz1taKVaMRj