During his Sunday announcement that U.S. special operations forces had killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, President Obama said, “Justice has been done.”
Not even the president’s harshest Republican critics would argue with that. But you know who could argue? Jos Truitt at Feministing:
That’s not what I call justice. I don’t see justice in violence responding to violence. I see vengeance. I don’t see justice in one killing in the midst of many. Where’s the justice in 10 years of war, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, now Libya? In the killing of uncounted, unacknowledged civilians, including when bin Laden was killed? In sending young Americans, my friends, overseas to kill and be killed? In endless war?
Where’s the justice in pumping money into war overseas while there’s continued state violence against people on American soil? Against American Indians robbed of resources and exposed to sexual violence? Where’s the justice in our “criminal justice” system? A system that locks up far too many people, far too many young people of color including invisibilized queer and trans youth, for non-violent reasons in prisons that produce increased violence within their walls, that condition people to this state of violence and then send them to do violence outside?
Where’s the justice in funding wars while Americans experience the more subtle violence of lack of access to health care, including reproductive health care? When the US deports huge numbers of immigrants? When the divide between rich and poor in this country is getting bigger every day, the poor group growing and the rich group shrinking?
How far gone into moral blindness can you be, to view the unspeakable acts of Osama bin Laden as equivalent to, e.g., the deportation of illegal aliens?
Herman Cain appeared on the Neal Cavuto show Wednesday afternoon to talk about Thursday’s debate in Greenville, South Carolina. Asked about the presumed GOP 2012 candidates who are skipping the debate, Cain said: “I think they’re making a mistake by not being here.”
With the first 2012 GOP presidential debate Thursday in South Carolina, top Republicans in the Palmetto State are warning several hopefuls who have chosen to skip the event that it will hurt them. “Anyone that discounts South Carolina is making a huge mistake,” said South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
South Carolina traditionally holds the first primary in the south. Since it began in 1980, no Republican has won the GOP presidential nomination without first winning the state. . . .
Gov. Haley believes skipping Thursday’s debate will put some of the candidates at odds with demanding Palmetto State voters eager to begin reviewing the candidates and their character.
“They’re gonna have to work twice as hard to prove that they’re in the game and while it is early, to show that you’re strong early makes an important difference in South Carolina,” Haley said. “So I would advise all of them get here, get here fast and make sure every part of the state notices you.”
Cain will be joined by Rep. Ron Paul, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson in Thursday’s debate (9 p.m. ET). Dave Weigel runs down the lineup, and explains why the no-shows are no-shows. The latest news from the Mitt Romney campaign is intriguing; one of his top New Hampshire supporters has quit:
Romney’s wishy-washy political identity and inability to stake out firm, consistent positions as a candidate were the reasons for his decision to cut ties with Romney. “He struggled with that in the last campaign,” [Bruce] Keough explains, “and to some extent I think he’s still struggling with it.”
Meanwhile, back to Thursday’s debate, Carl Cameron of Fox News observes: “Retail politics is key in South Carolina. The voters here insist on meeting the candidates and kicking the tire and figuring out what the candidates are all about.” Retail politics is where Cain says he’s strongest in early primary states. As he told Cavuto in Wednesday’s interview: “Start looking at some of the results we’re getting on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire.”
In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday’s 60 Minutes, President Obama says he won’t release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death. . . . Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Wednesday that the Obama administration should not release the gruesome post-mortem images, saying it could complicate the job for American troops overseas. Rogers told CBS News he has seen a post-mortem photo.
“The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” he said. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”
“If you’re a sergeant in a town in Ghazni, Afghanistan and you’re trying to get some local elder to cooperate about what’s happening in your village, are you going to do it if this inflames into some kind of trophy — we have a trophy of Osama bin Laden? I worry about that,” Rogers told [George Stephanopoulos]. “And if we can’t answer for sure and for certain this doesn’t make the job of that soldier easier, if it makes it harder, I say it’s not worth it.”
Just saw Fox News interview John McCain, who said: “My initial opinion is that it’s not necessary to [release the photos].”
If he sticks to this, it’s a bad move in my opinion. If the photo is being withheld out of sensitivity to Muslims, we are once again baptizing Osama bin Laden into mainstream Islam, after years of telling the world that OBL wasn’t a good Muslim. Stupid. Obama has just created his own pet version of the Warren Commission Report. If Obama sticks to this decision, we’ll get a lifetime of bad Photoshops and conspiracy theories out of it. And the radicals who want to kill us will still want to kill us.
UPDATE IV: In a White House briefing just now, spokesman Jay Carney said, “It’s not in our national security interests” to release the photos.
Right: But one way or another, the photos will be public within weeks — perhaps within days. The National Enquirer will pay somebody $50,000, the photos will be leaked, and then the White House will engage in public hand-wringing about how “irresponsible” it is for the Enquirer to publish the photos.
Does the phrase “plausible deniability” ring a bell?
As for our betters who say don’t release the photos because it might inflame the Religion of Peace into a murderous rage (a state also known as “everyday”) …everyone of you bastards better be on record either urging the withholding of or condemning the release of photos from Abu Ghraib.
UPDATE XI:Professor Glenn Reynolds: “This seems like a mistake to me, and the double-shuffle of contradictory messages that has led up to this decision hasn’t looked ready for prime time.”
Rather than bomb the compound, Obama (after 16 hours of deliberation and a half-round of golf) made the “gutsy” call to send SEAL troops into harm’s way so that he could make sure the US had proof of death. This was a “Kill Only” mission, we’re told — and the SEAL “assaulters” dutifully shot the unarmed bin Laden and his young bride. Obama then ordered a 45-minute burial ceremony, performed Arabic, in which bin Laden’s “Kill Only” corpse was cleaned and dressed and placed in a burial shroud. Then dumped into the sea.
And now Obama is saying he won’t release the proof of death he claimed was so vital — and Andrea Mitchell, among others, is satisfied with this: the government has all the proof it needs, so why show anyone else? Per Mitchell, we’re inherently to trust the government. Because it isn’t a Republican in the White House. So it must be good and righteous.
And besides, we don’t want to offend Muslim sensibilities. After all, there’s no telling how these inherently peaceful people might react to photos of a dead bin Laden, who doesn’t represent Islam in any way.
Like I said: “Plausible deniability.” The photo will leak, and the official reaction from the White House will be to denounce the leak. But this is just about maintaining appearances.
Sadly, I suspect the possibility of permanently elevating ObL to a near mythical stature was disregaded in favor of a more self-serving domestic political calculus.
Really: Why is it that jihadis post online videos of the executions of innocent Americans (e.g., Daniel Pearl) and yet, when we finally get the world’s most bloodthirsty terrorist, we can’t publish the photo because we’re afraid of inflaming “the Arab street”? I don’t give a damn one way or another whether they publish the photos, but I very much give a damn about U.S. officials kowtowing to the sensitivities of such savages: “Oh, we don’t want to offend them.”
They need to be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how.
Another habit, picked up during my college days: I always prefer to read while lying down. When I was in college, I’d take my textbooks to bed with me, fall asleep reading them, wake up and read some more until I fell asleep again. I’d sometimes spend most of the weekend like that, reading and napping all day, only leaving my dorm room to go eat lunch, until it was time to go out and party at night.
All of which is preamble to saying that I was re-reading Ann Coulter’s Slander last night when I went to bed. It had been a while since I first read it — it was published in 2002 — and I had almost forgotten how good it is. People who only know Coulter as a TV personality, trading snark with Hannity and O’Reilly on Fox News, ought to take time to read some of her books. She is a much better writer than most of her critics give her credit for, and probably even better than most of her fans realize.
Coulter’s writing is often aphoristic: She writes brilliant little sentences that hit the nail square on the head. At her best, she strikes those hammer blows in succession — bam! bam! bam! — and keeps it up for page after page. Such is the case with the seventh chapter ofSlander, “The Joy of Arguing With Liberals: You’re Stupid!” Continue reading It’s Kinda Hard to ‘Work the Refs’ When the Refs Are Playing for the Other Team →
A significant number of teens didn’t know who Osama Bin Laden was until we killed him. I can’t believe it — and yet I do believe it. I didn’t know what Iran Contra was when I was in high school, and I was a sophomore when it happened. Teenagers live in their own little world, only tangentially connected to the one the rest of us occupy. Today’s high-school freshmen weren’t even in Kindergarten when 9/11 happened. Why would they remember?
I think it’s just as significant in a way that so many of the people celebrating at Ground Zero and the White House seemed to be college kids. These were people who were nine or ten when the towers came down. I wonder if for them, hearing that Bin Laden had been killed wasn’t a bit like hearing that we mowed down Satan, or the Grinch — not the death of a specific person, but striking down the personification of evil in the world.
One of the most pernicious ideas of recent decades — originating in the 1960s “Generation Gap,” but getting worse all the time — is the belief that youth per se has some distinct political value, a belief which in turn involves a willingness to accept pop-culture hipness as actual knowledge.
Sarah Palin was the runaway winner with 27%, while Mitt Romney (11.6%) edged out Herman Cain (11.3%) for second. It’s also interesting to see that all the hype for Tim Pawlenty couldn’t boost the former Minnesota governor past 6%, while Newt Gingrich didn’t crack 2%.
Of course, this isn’t a random-sample scientific poll, but it does indicate how competitive Cain is among conservative activists online.
Isn’t it time you joined the online grassroots army at Citizens for Cain?
Since taking over the 8 p.m. spot vacated by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell has mounted an extraordinary effort to achieve what many would consider an impossible goal: Being more absurdly self-righteous than Olbermann.
Tuesday night, O’Donnell may have reached that mark by asserting that John Kerry was the gold standard in national security policy:
(Via Memeorandum.) Is O’Donnell serious? Did he even listen to his own video clip, when Kerry said that fighting terrorism “requires cooperation around the world”? In point of fact, although the U.S. shoveled out all kinds of foreign aid to Pakistan, we did not get that kind of cooperation. It wasn’t “cooperation” that resulted in finding Osama bin Laden: It was the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees captured by the CIA and U.S. military during the Bush presidency — interrogations that Democrats condemned, involving terrorists they insisted were being detained illegally. And the raid that killed bin Laden was conducted by military Special Operations troops (a branch of the service increased under Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense), not by “law enforcement,” and certainly not by the European allies that Kerry kept insisting should be granted veto authority over U.S. policy.
All of which is to say that the facts are 180 degrees out of phase with O’Donnell’s argument. With complete disregard for facts, O’Donnell evidently believes that counterfactual things can be made true merely by his say-so. “Fiat lux!”
My God, did you ever believe you’d see such a thing? O’Donnell has got me pining for the Good Old Days of Keith Olbermann!
But some things remain constant at MSNBC, especially the familiar douchebaggery of Chris Matthews who, amid his otherwise giddy celebration of the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s successful assassination of a Muslim leader, described Dick Cheny as a “sadist” :
Did you see that? It was a complete non sequitur. They were sitting there praising all Obama’s wonders when Howard Fineman mentioned Dick Cheney, so out of the blue, for no discernible reason whatsoever, Matthews says: “There’s a difference between being cold blooded — I think presidents have to be cold blooded — and being a sadist.” Howard Fineman then begins to say something else, but Matthews interrupts: “I was referring to Cheney, of course.”
Fineman, certainly no fan of Dick Cheney, wisely ignored that idiotic remark. You really have to feel sorry for the guests on Matthews’s show, who have to sit there and be polite while he blabs out that kind of nonsense.
