“We came, we saw, he died.”
Dubya was mocked, justly, for his weird little nervous chortle when he bragged about takin’ out the bad boys. But lately we’ve seen that getting the giggles over a political assassination is a bipartisan affliction.
It’s a trifle unseemly.
Hillary’s gloating comes on top of the president’s joke last year about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Thursday, last week the joke became a reality, when a drone-fired missile vaporized Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, like his father (and the Jonas Brothers) an American citizen.
And then there’s this guy Sullivan:
To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. And this time, the Arab world loves us as well.
The presumptions and non-sequiters in this are mind-boggling.
I will go out on a limb and call bullshit on the “Arabs loving us” part.
Finally, Jon Stewart pouts because the Republicans won’t give Obama high-fives. “[W]e don’t know what these rebels are going to do” is one of the Fox News positions mocked by Stewart.
For perhaps the first (and probably the last) time in my life, I’m with Fox ….
Stewart:
We removed a dictator in six months, losing no American soldiers, spending like a billion dollars rather than a trillion dollars and engendering what appears to be good will from people who now have a prideful story of their own independence to tell — not to mention, they have oil.
That last part? It makes it all OK?
Disappointing but not all that surprising, if you have a (selective) elephant’s memory like me, and recall Stewart’s sucking up to Colin Powell in 2005: “the Afghanistan war, man did I dig that. I’d like to go again.”
This is a rather negative post, I know. I have one positive thing to say. Pepe Escobar’s How the West won Libya has just the right blend of perceptive analysis, anger, and resignation. When the world celebrates with near unanimity the disfiguring of a corpse, it’s safe to assume things will get a lot worse before they get better.