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:
MM, ” President Obama can lose by “winning” in the Republican gutter or lose by losing in it; but neither outcome will make a cowardly “superpower” look anything but pathetic in its belligerent narcissism and puerile posturing. This coming November, America will get what it deserves because it has demanded nothing better.”
Sometimes it seems that we of the more melancholy bent may be simply the “town downers”, in seeing little but negatives on the American political scene (or Europe for that matter).
Undaunted optimists notwithstanding, there really isn’t much to encourage. These pissy bastards, all of them, are loathesome.
that would be the case you don’t have except in your own delusion.
I rest my case…
i always wonder why i waste my time, but its nice to see you have such a clear understanding of the presumption of innocence except when it doesn’t fit your tiny little model of the world. given your view i gather you are the last honest person on earth who comprehends the vast injustice and inequalities of our existence. your profound insight into the sense and nonsense in the hearts of others and your willingness to judge others with such certainty based on facts you can not possibly know first hand is admirable.
my hats off to you for your divine wisdom, insight and all knowing eye. I commend your desire for a public trial of mr. bin laden and your private notion of injustice for all others..
Mike Spindell:
Ryan’s budget is increasing spending by 3% whereas Obama’s is increasing spending by 4.5%. There is no cutting in the Ryan budget.
Sorry 1Zb1, I was wrong. You are apparently not aware of the nonsense.
so you have now gone from the nuremberg trials to healthcare, social security, bush, cheny, not capturing bin laden so he gets a fair trial, and everybody is a liar.
a little story; i am named after my cousin. he was a crewman on a b-17. he flew 24 missions. 2 weeks before the end of the war in europe he did a mission to drebin. his plane was in the low flight. there was smoke over the target from the bombs of the flight in front of him so the commander ordered them to go around. 3 times he ordered them to go around because they couldn’t see the target.
now, i’m thinking about the kid – they were all kids – who commanded that flight and decided to go around 3 times. i’m thinking he wanted to go home so badly he could taste it. if he was at all like my cousin he probably already wrote home to his family telling them the war was almost over and he’d be homes soon. and i’ll bet he was also thinking about the several hundred guys in those planes he was leading and how each time he ordered them to go around they were cursing him, and he was probably cursing himself, as well..
but then there was the smoke. the bombardier couldn’t see the target. 3 times he ordered them to go around; two weeks before the end of the war and going home.
on the third pass they dropped their bombs. as they left the target my cousins plane was hit . one man was thrown clear – it was not my cousin – and the other ten died. another plane was also lost. another 10 men.
i’m think about the kid in command. he gave the order 3 times because he could not see the target, he’s lived with that order ever since.
you know something, bb, you may think you know what’s nonsense and think you know what those guys did, but you don’t know jack..
It absolutely begs credulity that Obama couldn’t have had Bin Laden captured alive just as Bush did with Saddam Hussein.
It’s the weakest excuse I have ever heard for such an argument. You are seriously positing that Obama, with all the technology available to him today, couldn’t have captured Bin Laden alive? Give me a break.
Even the reports we have suggest that he was summarily executed without necessity, but to suggest there was no other way is simply pathetic. And I guess dumping him in the Atlantic was also unavoidable? Kind of like the tree that jumps out at you when you are driving thus causing an unavoidable accident?
no, it just means it wasn’t a good example. minor point: based on the accounts we have (which may obviousely be self serving from a legal standpoint) he made capture not possible.
That’s nonsense and you know it.
But what I said above does not detract from the Nuremberg Trials nor does it take away from the pull of civilization and fair play that characterized much of our society (both here and in Europe) as seen by the effort of the Western alliance to treat the barbarity of the Nazi’s with judicial fairness.
Where would you find the Nuremberg Trials today, 1Zb1? Would you find them in the way we are dealing with the banking foreclosure fiasco? In the way we haven’t prosecuted so much as a single high level player in the banks even though we know they are guilty of downright illegal behavior? Would you find such civilization in our complete failure to bring Bush or Cheney or any of their gang to justice for their crimes against humanity? Or would you find it in the way we completely ignore the crimes Obama is committing against the constitution and the spirit of democracy itself with his warrantless death squads and presidential authority to trash all jurisprudence?
Would you find something similar to the Nuremberg Trials in the way we are privatizing health care and setting up social security and Medicare for the same fate? Does raw greed and the profit motive seem to you to be the “civilized” way to care for the health of our citizens?
Yes, you can always find our darker side, particularly in times of war as in WWII. BTW, we are NOT AT WAR today irrespective of our propaganda. But where would you choose to shine a light on any aspect of our great civilization today 1Zb1? Show me something, anything damn it, even close to the extraordinary sense of fairness and civilization it took to deal with the Nazi machine of extermination with the trials of a court where they could challenge their accusers and defend themselves.
no, it just means it wasn’t a good example. minor point: based on the accounts we have (which may obviousely be self serving from a legal standpoint) he made capture not possible.
yup, we were so civilized back then more civilians died from our firebombing tokyo then the atomic bomb on hiroshima.
So that incisive logic means what, no trial needed? We also as a society considered torture abhorrent back then even though we secretly used it on rare occasions. So? Does that make it perfectly ok for NPR and 90 percent of the media today to claim that torture is legal because the president says it is? Do those acts in any way alter the mind numbing implications that more than 50% or our population today are in favor of torture? Does our barbarity in firebombing Tokyo or the fact that we interred thousands of Japanese Americans in camps in anyway contradict the decline of our civilization today as witnessed by the fact that we rarely if ever even consider such things as a “fair trial” when we talk about Bin Laden?
yup, we were so civilized back then more civilians died from our firebombing tokyo then the atomic bomb on hiroshima.
After the second world war, we made a big point of setting up the Nuremberg Trials for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. The Nazi’s had done far more and of a far more henious nature than Bin Laden, but rather than kill them in secret with commando teams and then dump them into the Atlantic, we went to great lengths to provide them with what they had denied the Jews and the rest of Europe; the right to a fair trial.
This is what should have been done with Bin Laden. The fact that it wasn’t and even more the fact that we barely even mention it, speaks more eloquently about the decline of our civilization than almost any other single topic.
This might perhaps be of interest to some:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-GOP-A-Party-Possessed-by-Jillian-Barclay-120501-68.html
mm, and you actually think that just made sense?
even though we are of the same age your understanding of asymmetric warfare is obviously a bit dated. today it means that anyone can strike anywhere; it means a handful of people can cause trillions of dollars in impacts and thousands of lives; it means the battle zones are not always fought in far away countries but potentially anywhere.
that it is difficult to deal with and fight – or there is poor success rate – does not change that it exists or that just because you stop fighting it others do the same.
because people are afraid, (or easy to fear) does not mean they don’t have real reason to be afraid. but of course 911 never happened so there is no reason to be afraid, except of the government which was actually behind it (according to you)
now, in your disconnect from reality we should just go into complete isolation (is that ron paul i hear knocking at the door). if we get out of all these countries with people that hate us it was all just go away. we should just stop dealing with the rest of the world, no trade no nothing and all will be well?
i’ll let you ponder that concept for a little bit as you turn off your computer and trade in your car for a made in china cycle.
like i said, reality. if you want to actually figure out how to deal with problems its a good place to start. ps. you need to learn something about sentence structure – even when its in abbreviated form.
” … a simple reality in our age is there are no small enemies only large targets and we are the biggest (the technical term is asymetric warfare).” — 1zb1
Normally, I would dismiss this facile, glib vacuity as nothing but a talking-point sound byte of the type produced upon short-order by Republican party belief-tanks (like think thanks, only without the doubt that causes real thinking). But in this instance I’ll deconstruct it so as to make its inherent absurdities more explicit.
First: if not even small enemies exist then the large target has nothing to fear. But in fact, the largest, self-identified target in the world has consumed itself in fear of the minuscule, if not invisible. As Gore Vidal has truthfully put it: “Americans are among the most easily frightened people on earth.” No doubt about it.
Second: if the largest self-identified target in the world insists upon shooting itself in its own face, what worse damage would the non-existent little enemies have left to inflict upon it?
Third: Why would any country make a large target of itself by making enemies where none previously existed? National Masochism?
Fourth: If the largest target in the world breaks its own toes kicking the doorstop of a neighbor’s doghouse, then the large target should not blame either the doorstep or the dog for the pain and doctor bills.
Fifth: I graduated from a year’s training at the Defense Language Institute and Counter Insurgency School before spending a year-and-a-half in Vietnam. Our textbooks said: “Win their hearts and minds.” Our instructors translated: “Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” The Vietnamese we actually met in their own country seemed to have their hearts and minds set on us leaving and our attempts to grab them by their balls usually resulted in us grabbing ourselves by ours. America has an abysmal record of failing at asymmetric warfare, precisely because America refuses to accept and learn from its many and continuing defeats at a game it does not have the wisdom not to play in the first place. As the country once learned (briefly, before forgetting again), when it comes to asymmetrical warfare against little countries:
“We lost the day we started and we win the day we stop.”
Or, as W. C. Fields once said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it.”
Only a damn fool would involve America in asymmetrical warfare, because the little enemies that don’t exist before we attack them will never play fair against the largest target in the world when it bombs, invades, and occupies them for decades. And only a world-class fool like America would make so many enemies while making itself a target so large that no enemy in the world could miss it.
I could go on, but that should about cover it for now.