“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.}
