 |
| Breaking News: America Gets a Victory |
The spiritual mastermind behind the worst day in American history has been killed, but much more work still remains to destroy the radical ideology that he promoted.
Islamofascism must be destroyed.
President Obama was due to address the nation at 10:30PM tonight, but is late. I had heard from other sources that the military had been ordered to Condition BRAVO which typically precedes significant national security events.
DEVELOPING.
UPDATE: President Obama delivered the best speech I have ever heard from him. OBL was killed by an American ground operation in Pakistan. A crowd has gathered outside the White House celebrating this victory against al Qaeda and Islamofascist Terrorism.
UPDATE 2: Statement from former Presidents Clinton and Bush (43):
Bush called the operation a “momentous achievement” that “marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”
“I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude,” the former president said in a statement. “The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”
Former President Bill Clinton, who was in office for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, also issued a written statement.
"I congratulate the President, the National Security team and the members of our armed forces on bringing Osama bin Laden to justice after more than a decade of murderous al-Qaida attacks," he said.
Mark's Remarks
I also give thanks for the men and women of our armed forces, and for President Obama reneging on campaign promises to lefties, like MAINTAINING BUSH POLICIES of rendition, enhanced interrogations, keeping GITMO Open, and keeping a troop presence in the Mid East. Thank you, Mr. Obama, for not honoring your word to your supporters. I am with Glenn Beck--bury the guy somewhere in the Grand Canyon with a ham sandwich as a hat. Again, we pay too much respect to the "religion of peace." You know, one of the cowards protecting Osama actually used a woman as a human shield and she was killed as well as the cowardly terrorists? We need to quit worrying about what the radicals think. They will hate us as much as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn do already.
And don't believe the hype that this proves Obama's foreign policy and military bona fides. Don't fall for the hype that this means reelection is a slam dunk. Yes, there will be a poll bump, but remember this: George HW Bush had a 90+% approval rating going into election season of 1992. See how that turned out. Remember the Israeli election in the 1970s--everyone thought the daring Israeli raid would give the ruling Labor party the victory, but rather conservative Menahem Begin won. Don't get discouraged. Today is indeed a day for reflection and a sigh of relief. However, the war continues. And we should marvel that in spite of our President weakening America's economy and standing with the world, our men and women in the armed forces and clandestine services are able to do such an amazing thing.
3:37pm Mark's Remarks Update
I was shocked that the President ONLY used I, Me, My less than 25 times in the speech last night. Unlike Matt, I don't think it was any great speech. I rank it with all the other self promoting speeches. Only when talking about President Bush's era do we get the words "our" or "your" or "we", and some of it is taking credit for things he wasn't involved in and may not have supported. Mark Steyn agrees with me:
Personally, I would have liked bin Laden’s death to have been announced by whatever lowest-level official was manning the night desk at the Department of Nondescript Bureaucrats, preferably reading it off the back of an envelope. But, if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.
Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:
Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.
I was, I confess, a little stunned by the first part of the President’s speech. It was, as Mr Hunter says, overwritten. It managed to be both overwrought and generic – all that telepromptered overload about cloudless Tuesday mornings was not only tackily over-prettified but came over as unfelt and hand-me-down, like a course exercise in some third-rate creative-writing school’s Soaring Oratory class. Or, at any rate, as if they’d loaded up a first draft of September’s tenth anniversary speech into the machine. The official announcement was delayed for all this? If ever there was a moment for the commander-in-chief to be real, plainspoken and off his glassy-eyed follow-the-bouncing-ball routine, this was it. It’s as if nobody around him knows how to write except in the one tinny key.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to rally round the flag, and rally round the President, but rally round this speech? No thanks.
I find the 5th and 6th paragraphs to be really disgusting and duplicit:
We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice. We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda -- an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe. And so we went to war against al Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies.
Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort. We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense. In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support. And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.
Um, Barry, you during Sept. 2001 were writing editorials about how we must be sure to be nice to Islamists and were more worried about coddling those who worked against us. During your administration you have actively worked to negotiate with the Taliban. It was our military under President Bush, who removed the Taliban, while you and your anti war lefty buddies were calling them terrorists and worrying about treating our prisoners with respect, even while people like Matt Maupin and Danny Pearl were tortured and killed with no respect for human decency.
Typical, narcissistic Obama. And typical at giving mixed messages. On the one hand, WE GOT HIM. On the other, we had to bend over backwards to give him a decent burial and respect his "religion." Obama has to do, as Bush so irritated me with doing, the traditional, we are not at war against Islam blah de blah de blah. These savages out there don't care we gave him a decent burial or that we tried to lower casualties. They only understand annihiliation. Ugh. Andy McCarthy at NRO agrees with me:
Still, the operation cannot but underscore the mind-bending inconsistencies in Obama’s counterterrorism — gold-plated due process for some 9/11 terrorists but assassination for others; the haste to close Gitmo even as it continues to serve valuable security purposes; the paralysis of interrogation policies that (as Shannen, Steve, and others point out) were key to obtaining intelligence that not only thwarts attacks but enabled us to find bin Laden; the crackdown against al Qaeda while engaging the Muslim Brotherhood despite its sustenance of Hamas; the avowed commitment to fight terrorism while demonstrating indifference to the promotion of terrorism by Iran, Syria, and other rogue regimes; rhetorically lashing out at the Taliban (as Obama did in yesterday’s speech) while seeking a negotiated settlement with the Taliban; and so on.
Obama rarely talks about the war — indeed, he resists referring to war as “war.” This, coupled with his paradoxical approach to it, will limit the political benefit he derives from positive developments in the war, including one as extremely positive as taking out bin Laden. Meanwhile, the urgency of debt, unemployment, and climbing consumer prices will very quickly divert the public’s attention from bin Laden. The 2012 election will probably not be any more influenced by yesterday’s successful operation than the 1992 election was by victory in the Gulf War.
