Short Bits: Killing Osama

I seem to remember a soldier being court-martialed for giving a captured terrorist, a fat lip. Now I could be wrong; I never heard anything about it again. I understand, the rules of engagement are really quite stringent – unless, of course, they are overruled by the Commander-in-Chief.

A police officer who has killed in the course of duty often requires many hours of counseling. Now that Obama has a targeted kill under his belt, he cannot help being a changed man. (Somebody must have given the order to ‘kill on sight’.) He can now go one of two ways. Either he will grow hesitant and indecisive, or he will take on the role of mob boss with renewed gusto.

Killing has always been the ultimate wet dream of the Left. I remember people incessantly toying with the idea while Bush was still in office. And just this week liberal talk show host, Mike Malloy, proposed on air that the Navy Seals kill “mass-murderer” George W. Bush.

Despite the apparent applause from all virtually quarters, I cannot shake a distinct sense of unease.
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Now for a different view by Corlyss D, Guest Contributer, responding to John Batchelor's question, "Why not capture him (OBL)?"

Hypothesize me no hypotheticals. They are frankly less than worthless. Reality demands response. You can sit and think and think all day long about "what ifs."

I say good on SEAL Team 6! We need more of that kind of covert assassination rather than a moralizing epitaph for the dead. A writer who fancies himself a historian and moralist declared a couple of years ago that the only "winners" of WW2 were the European Jews because most of them died and, in so doing, aquired a sort of beatification of the defenseless. The writer implied that was a state that all peoples should aspire to if they want their reputations to survive conflict. Bugger that.

"Why not capture him?" (John Batchelor asks.) "Infamous war criminals make for epochal landmark war crimes prosecution (the delusional, deprraved, stupid Martin Borman: and surely the Nuremberg gang was far more frightening the Bin Laden)."

Why capture him? The Nuremberg trials might have been epochal, but they were a huge political mistake. They gave the illusion of state action without a legitmate state. They polluted the judicial process with a star chamber whose outcome was never in doubt. They wasted a lot of money creating the impression that there was such a thing as consensus in an international community that was hardly more developed than the Libyan resistence is today. Churchill was right: the trials have indeed come back to haunt the hell out of us, establishing a precedent that lives in the feckless ICC and the misguided internationalist blather that motivates many policy makers in the EU and other trend-setters seeking legitimacy for an international community incapable of doing anything but relief work by consensus. Quasi-states are impotent in so many categories of critical civil society functions that to bestow on them serious state functions like law enforcement and war-making capability is simply delusional.
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Final thought: I guess what has me upset is that this Osama killing accrues to Obama. It’s just one more way for Obama to maintain the illusion that he is an ‘American’. He is not. Everything he’s done has been detrimental to our nation. I say it’s deliberate. Read Kimberly A. Strassel’s opinion piece entitled “Obama’s ‘Gangster Politics’” in today’s WSJ; and then go on to read Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.’s “Barney Frank’s Latest Bad Idea”. Then turn the page and read Michael B. Mukasey’s “The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden”. And that’s just today! Every day brings a fresh outrage or more. And now we’re supposed to forget it all and say he’s the best thing since sliced bread? Not me, brother!

Perhaps Cicero said it best:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

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