Tag: Osama bin Laden

Barack Obama is 50

“Yeah. Yeah. The decision was made.
“I made the decision Thursday night, informed my team Friday morning, and then we flew off to look at the tornado damage. To go to Cape Canaveral, to make a speech, a commencement speech.”

I suppose it’s true of a lot of Americans: Barack Obama is the first President to be born after I was. And by a lot, over eight years. He’s had some successes, and he’s surely had his failures. But today I’ll focus on the positive aspects. (The negative will come soon enough.)

First, I thought he was working very hard on trying to come to grips with the financial crisis, even before he was inaugurated, and I admired that. (The guy who was ostensibly still in charge kept a low profile, for sure.)

One can argue about the speed of progress regarding gay rights, but the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would NOT have taken place in a John McCain administration. This administration has done more for gay rights than any other.

The overhaul of financial regulations, consumer protection, and health care, while fraught with disappointments along the way, is arguably better than it was.

But I thought his most significant period was the days leading up to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Not so much the action itself as much as his clear ability to multitask.

From his interview on CBS News’ 60 Minutes:
“Yeah. Yeah. The decision was made.
“I made the decision Thursday night, informed my team Friday morning, and then we flew off to look at the tornado damage. To go to Cape Canaveral, to make a speech, a commencement speech. And then we had the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. So this was in the back of my mind all weekend.” watch Obama’s part of the dinner from about 24:30.

So he had some successes…

Happy birthday, Mr. President.

(Great Grand)Father

She saw him as this pillar of virtue, who crumbled as an icon for her.

There was a recent news story that reminded me of my family.

My dad’s maternal grandfather was a man everyone simply called Father. He wasn’t a Catholic priest, of course, but he was a deeply religious, pious man. I actually remember him; he died in the early 1960s when he was over 90. He was always decent to me, and my father adored him. But Father’s children clearly feared him. It was strange to me; he was a little old man, but my grandmother and her siblings, who were in their 50s and 60s were in terror of this diminutive fellow.

After he died, his house was cleaned out. And what do you suppose the relatives found? What they used to call “girlie magazines”. And booze. This was especially terrible for my mother, who had been married a dozen years or more to my Dad. She saw him as this pillar of virtue, who crumbled as an icon for her.

I’m not sure when I first heard this story – certainly not at the time – though I suspect I was a teenager. I DO know that my mother told of her disappointment of this man periodically for the next 40 years or more. I think this revelation really shook her sense of faith for a number of years.

Of course, the recent story that prompted this recollection was the stash of pornography found in the residence of Usama bin Laden. Or was it porn ‘stache? As more than one comic has remarked, USL’s off to meet his 72 vegans (David Letterman’s joke), or 72 Virginians, or 72 pick-your-word-starting-with-the-letter-V.

Closure…or Not

While some Republicans congratulated Obama, others praised GW Bush for using Gitmo as an intelligence source, while pointedly ignoring Obama’s role.


I woke up ridiculously early Monday morning, around 3:50 a.m., and just could not get back to sleep, so I went to the computer. Ah, Bin Laden’s dead. Hmm. Where’s my fist pump? Maybe I’m still too tired.

I came across Kevin Marshall’s piece, which was entitled “No closure from Osama bin Laden’s death”, and even before I read the actual piece, I realized that he was on the right track. Key half-sentence: “I became confused as to why I didn’t feel that level of joy that everyone else seemed to be expressing.” It reminded me of what I wrote about the execution of Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Then I went to Reader Wil’s page. She said, “…People are glad that this cruel man is dead. Isn’t it terrible that we should be glad that somebody is killed, even if he deserved it? It asks for revenge and hatred. The death of any tyrant is cause for satisfaction for one group and cause for fury, anger, and revenge for his friends.” Sounds about right.

The next stop was Mark Evanier’s post: “Boy, it’s nice to see America so happy. This country has been in bad need of a hug for a long time and the killing of Osama Bin Laden seems to be it, at least in some quarters.” Yeah, I saw the celebrations in New York and DC and elsewhere, but is AMERICA happy? And if America’s so happy, why aren’t I?

After finally going to sleep and too soon getting up again, I started reading more responses. Newsmax echoed Evanier’s point: “Bin Laden Death Gives US Reason to Cheer,” to get us out our “surly” state over “rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics”. Wow – now I can ignore the $4.159 per gallon gasoline, up six cents just this week, at the local station.

So I watch the Today show and read more stories and find the samo samo. While some Republicans congratulated Obama, others praised GW Bush for using Gitmo as an intelligence source, while pointedly ignoring Obama’s role. Meanwhile, someone was blathering about the liberals and the Ground Zero site, and I tuned out. And speaking of nasty partisan politics…

Let me be clear: I’ll shed no tears for Osama bin Ladin. But this paragraph in David Sirota’s article in Salon rings too true: “This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory: He has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in the news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history — the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.” I also noticed Jack Bauer, the fictional character from the TV show 24, was tracking on Twitter, and I knew for sure that this one death is no cure-all.
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Steve Bissette’s rant, Part 1 and Part 2. And on a lighter note, how the former Kate Middleton helped to do in Usama.

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