It’s funny watching the Obama faithful come out today to lionize Obama over the reported killing of Bin Laden. For instance David Frum.
“But it is also a deservedly bad moment for some of the destructive forces in American public life: for those who have substituted for ordinary politics a sustained campaign to brand President Obama as an outsider, as un-American, as non-American.
Those of us who oppose this administration’s economic and foreign policies have had so many valid points to make.
Yet some have insisted on traveling beyond those valid points. They have called the president “post American.” A “Third world dictator.” An individual whose behavior could only be interpreted as “Kenyan post-colonial.” A “thug in chief.” They have tried to present US politics not as a choice between liberal and conservative, but as a choice between American and non-American, between real Americans and between a dangerous dark-skinned intruder. They have sought to portray the President as a man who could not be trusted to lead the country because he owed no loyalty to the country – because he did not belong in the country.
After the events of the past 72 hours, those kinds of attacks should be finished now. It’s a cleaner world without bin Laden soiling it. And American politics will be cleaner for the expunging of the malicious fantasy of the president’s non-Americanness.
President Obama has performed the first job of an American president: he has used the power of the nation well to defeat the nation’s enemies and defend the nation’s people. After an interval for celebration of yesterday’s accomplishment, it will be back to politics as usual. But let’s hope that this time, the usual will have this difference: that the administration can be criticized as “liberal” without being libeled as “alien.”
Let’s be clear, Obama didn’t kill Osama. He ordered it, but that’s what any president would have done given the circumstances. We’re all glad that Osama is dead but we have no one to thank but those whom Obama has demonized in the past, our men and women in uniform and the CIA. Let’s not pretend that Obama has morphed into some great leader simply because he made no-brainer decision.
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One Response
retire05
May 3rd, 2011 at 12:16 am
1Mac, Obama will take all the credit for the kill, although now it’s being leaked that KSM gave it up on the courier after he had been waterboarded. That, we can thank President Bush for.
And what’s up with the “Islamic” burial for ObL? I understand some 9-11 families are pissed saying that they didn’t even have bodies to bury. Remember, their loved ones were turned to dust that drifted all across lower Manhatten.
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