“The success of the operation in Abbottabad now makes Obama’s rivals look small indeed, Lilliputians chasing wild fantasies while Gulliver deals with the things that matter. He has rendered even more laughable Donald Trump’s declaration that ‘I feel proud of myself’ for flushing out the proof of Obama’s Hawaiian birth. The president has shown what a true achievement looks like.”
I can understand the sentiment. It’s, of course, deeply satisfying to see the disgusting demagogues of the American right lost for words. And it’s, of course, a good thing that a terrorist psycopath like Bin Laden has been taken out of action*.
*I agree with Geoffrey Robertson that, ideally,
http://www.scarpella.com/pictures/di...e.php?pos=-545, Bin Laden would have been taken alive and put on trial. But from what we know about the operation, I don’t agree with Ken Livingstone’s verdict that Obama behaved like a ”mobster”.
3) Macho politics is a game at which the right will win over the long term. If you have a political culture that says force is admirable, the brainless cowboys have an inbuilt advantage.
Tagged in: barack obama, Hillary Clinton, Jonathan Freedland,
http://blog.yzdsb.com.cn/bd/space.ph...blog&id=643068, osama bin laden
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1) It encourages liberals to compete among themselves for the national security vote. This results in pathetic spectacles such as Hillary Clinton’s notorious “3am phone call” advert in the 2008 Democrat primaries, which implied that Obama was too wimpy to be president. Did this end up helping the Democrats? No; it just gifted the Republicans a useful attack line.
Three reasons.
Here’s a thought experiment for liberals: What if Bush had been in the White House when Bin Laden was tracked down. What if the former president had given the order to take him out? Would that have turned Bush into a Gulliver compared with the Democrat’s Lilliputians? Of course not. So liberals should beware crowing too much about this “achievement” from Obama now,
http://www.bookstocollect.com/galler...ge.php?pos=-81, which, let’s be realistic, is probably more a result of patient intelligence work than the president’s leadership.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland says the killing of Osama bin Laden makes Barack Obama look like a big man.
2) It encourages presidents, of all political stripes,
Christian Louboutin Platforms sale, to use force as a first resort. Bin Laden was, obviously,
http://duducapoeira.com/photo##############...e.php?pos=-698,
pandora necklaces sale, a special case. And the strike seems to have been very well planned. But other calls on whether to send in Navy Seals or missiles to take out some terror chief will be more marginal. And the planning will not always be so extensive. The 1993 battle of Mogadishu shows how these kind of snatch/kill operations can go badly wrong. US drone strikes on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in recent years have been of questionable effectiveness, have killed many civilians, and provoked deep anger towards America. Yet I suspect we’re likely to see more of them, not less,
http://www.sgcin.gov.cn/70626_ReadNews.asp?NewsID=589,
pandora jewelry, in the wake of the killing of Bin Laden.
But it’s dangerous for liberals to promote the narrative, as Freedland does,
cheap pandora charms, that dispatching bad guys burnishes a leader’s credentials.
Freedland talks about the enduring taste for “male violence” in US politics. But liberals should challenge this mentality, not pander to it. Otherwise, no matter how sweet this moment feels,
Christian Louboutin shoes on sale, it is liable to end up consuming them.