Special "GotHim BinLaden" Edition
1) So...trillions of tax dollars, two unnecessary wars, and ten long years, and it turns out, the guy was hiding in a gated community.
2) Was it worth roughly $6,000 for each of you and your family for this? Was it worth the five thousand or so American lives? Or the half million Iraqis and Afghanis?
3) The Pakistani government, particularly the military, comes off looking awfully bad in all this. Bush was too quick to accept Musharaff's assistance so gladly. We had no business treating him as an ally.
4) I think when history has its say, one of the reasons Bush refused to even look for Bin Laden (and to obstruct any legitimate attempts to capture or kill him) was out of fealty to the Saudi royal family. It's hard to stand tall against an enemy when your dad is in a business partnership (Carlyle) with his uncle. It took someone with the stones to stand up to the House of Saud and say "Screw you, we're taking him out."
5) Bin Laden dies knowing he accomplished what he set out to do: destroy America. For fifteen years, he carefully dissected the weaknesses of our "democracy" and our capitalist economy. He demonstrated the fear will trump (pun intended) principles every time. He managed to reveal that America can torture with the best of tyrannies, that America can oppress its people economically, that America can take a thriving economy and turn it into a bankruptcy, and that America will elect the weakest possible leaders if given half a chance and a immoral faction whose lust for power overwhelms their patriotism. Allah could not have handed him a better adversary than George W. Bush, a man so morally corrupt and politically inept that he managed to take a moment that could have united the entire world, including the Arabic street, behind him and make that same world ridicule him and hate us.
6) They didn't hate us for our freedom, Mr.Bush: they hated you for being an idiot and us for electing you twice.
7) President Obama, the two-term President. Get used to that. The public perception, as wrong-headed as it will be, is that Osama bin Laden = terrorism. That means, perceptually, Obama won the war on terror. That makes economic news and unemployment take a back seat. Indeed, if anything, it may jump start the economy. Good news has a way of doing that.
8) Sarah Palin is irrelevant. Michelle Bachmann is irrelevant. Donald Trump is irrelevant (and how much did Obama savor the thought of jumping ugly during Trump's preccious iddle teebee pwogwam?)
9) If Obama's White House is smart, and I suspect they may be smarter than I give them credit for, now is the time to press hard for a budget deal and a debt ceiling deal. Boener and the Teabaggers will have a hard time arguing with the guy who just took out the guy no one else could.
10) This is not, by any means, closure. It's soothing, to be sure, and encouraging, but closure will be when all accountable have been held accountable, including a former President.
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