Left Foot, Right Foot

Still glad that Osama is dead, regardless of the lame post-raid "burial at sea" and other machinations. But, the Obama administration's approach in the aftermath reminds me why I can never be a liberal.

Conservatives are often accused of having a simple-minded, Manichean view of the world. But, at least, we didn't spend 8+ years excoriating legitimate law enforcement and military activity in the pursuit of our enemies. At least we didn't turn around and use those exact same techniques, or at least the fruits of those techniques, to find Osama. At least we didn't create a legal mish-mash out of our once-straightforward legal precedents about the treatment of enemy combatants, such that targeted killings are the only option left. At least our multi-cultural vanity doesn't cause us to bury people at sea in accordance with some sort of "Islamic law" that no one has ever heard of (I know camels are the ships of the desert, but Arabs are not known as sea faring people). And so on.

Worst of all is the idea that we shouldn't see the Osama death photos because they would enflame the Middle East (which is normally quiescent and calm as a Tea Party rally) due to fears of our seeming to be "spiking the football." That's according to our scold-in-chief, who reveals himself all too well with that comment. It's a cliche' among transnational sophisticates that yokel Americans are dull-witted apes who care only about God, guns, and football. That may be true- hey, we like to enjoy ourselves, we Americans - but that doesn't mean we don't know how to be serious. And if you're talking about 9/11 and the evil men who were responsible for that terrible day, we are dead serious, even when we're making "72 virgin jokes" and chanting "USA! USA!"

Hunting down Bin Laden and his cohort was serious business, something that Pres. Bush never failed to make clear. But, he had to contend with a determined fifth column, virtually the entire left wing of American politics, which demagogued and delayed virtually every effective measure taken to prosecute the war on terror (or so-called "war on terror" in the parlance of the Left). And the extent to which the formerly strident "defender of the Constitution" adopted the Bush-era policies he once criticized would be laughable if it was so profoundly deceptive. Indeed, the extent to which Democrats are now desperately trying to maintain the political fiction that waterboarding is "torture" shows how much they want people to forget all of that noble rhetoric, which became inoperative on 1/21/2009.

Obama may get a "bounce" out of this. But, the days following one of the few genuine triumphs of the last 3+ years show how much of a deceptive unamerican leftist he and his followers remain.