“Go in that bag and find my wallet. It’s the one that says ‘Bad Muthafucka’ on it.”
— Pulp Fiction
From whiplash (Osama’s dead!) to backlash (How dare you celebrate?), I counted about 30 seconds. It’s a bit exhausting. Sure, the jingoistic “America, fuck yeah!” nonsense is annoying, but so is people being pious about how all murder is always bad. I’m a vegetarian who doesn’t support the death penalty. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pause and mourn the end of a killer.
Maybe I’ve just been watching too many action movies, or maybe it’s all the Game of Thrones I’ve been reading (I’m on Book 3 and I’ve counted about 2,300 corpses and 657 rapes). Maybe I’m desensitized. Or maybe, as the Onion puts it:
I’m going to devote my energy to wondering how this will affect Barry O, newly President Bad Motherfucka.
Blue state boyfriend Nate Silver addresses the issue here.
Seems to me it helps Obama that Osama wasn’t captured and brought to trial: that helps him break out of the detached intellectual stereotype. I mean, even Rush Limbaugh took five seconds off today from his usual habit offending all decent people to say, “Thank God for President Obama.”
This makes me think I’m not alone in admiring the way Obama made this happen. There was good intelligence and more good intelligence; there was thinking and planning and THEN targeted, specific, successful action. If our wars had been considered along those lines, they would be going a hell of a lot better than they are now — or, even better, they would never have been embarked on at all.
My brother points out that, in an ideal world, perhaps this raid would have happened in October 2012. You know Karl Rove would have arranged that if he could. But one can’t have everything.
{Hilarious gifs and images compiled by the folks at Ranker.}
I was totally sure that W was going to pull out a dead OBL in October 2004. Glad Obama got this one for his tally sheet. First thing I thought was that better help him get reelected.
Also, worth reading GoT? I’ve been watching the series and like it, but get exhausted just thinking about all those pages and POVs.
I’ve been reading the books on a borrowed iPad and I highly recommend that experience. You don’t have to carry around each 1,000 page tome, and you get lulled into living in the moment since you have no idea how far you are into it and how much is left. (Also you don’t have to worry about what people on the subway think of you.) (Except for worrying that they think you’re a pretentious douchebag for carrying around an iPad.)
In any universe other than the bizarro no-such-thing-as-satire-any-more one in which we live this would be surprising, but it turns out Rush Limbaugh was not actually expressing approval for the president in the wake of the death of murderous islamofascist Osama bin Laden.
http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/05/02/rush_limbaugh_on_bin_laden_killing_conservative_firebrand_offers.html
Man! I was totally taken in. Okay, well, I’m glad I can return to thinking that he is a human slug.