Courtesy of Karl Denninger of The Market Ticker
First things first: For those who are too dense to figure it out, I’m glad that evil SOB is dead.
That’s not the purpose of this Ticker, however. Rather, I’d like to reflect on 9/11 a bit and decorum.
Should we, as a nation, be glad that Bin Laden has assumed room temperature, and according to our government, has been reduced to shark food and recycled by the earth? Yep. There are in fact people who are sworn enemies of our nation. He was one of them, and he is now gone.
For the conspiracy nuts who argue that he’s still alive, if you’re right then our government has committed one of the biggest blunders in history. All he has to do is show up with today’s newspaper in his hands on a video and what’s left of our government’s credibility is instantly destroyed. The Administration knows this, which is why I don’t buy the nutters who claim that he’s still breathing.
On the other side of the aisle there are those who insist that we iced him years ago – or that he succumbed to disease many years prior. I don’t buy that either; he’s shown up on videos as recently as last year. The half-life of a dead man, even one who produced a bunch of tapes before he died, is limited by current events he couldn’t possibly know about in advance.
Rather I’d like to look at the difference between being glad that he’s gone and the "Dancing with the Stars" sort of reaction we saw in Washington DC Sunday night. The latter, my friends, I have a serious problem with.
Would I go out and celebrate an actual end of the "War on Terror"? You bet. Let me know when it happens. When the TSA has been dismantled. When The Patriot Act is repealed. When the 4th Amendment is retrieved from the toilet bowl, cleaned of all the crap it has accumulated over the last three decades and restored to its rightful place in The Constitution.
Then – and only then – will I celebrate.
Would I have celebrated the end of WWII? You bet. That was the actual end of a war. But this was not. This was the death of a man. It was no more then end of a war than was 9/11 the End of America. People in Muslim lands the world over celebrated when the towers fell.
I’m also deeply concerned about what we’ve discovered. Specifically, this "compound" where Bin Laden was found and killed was constructed in 2005.
If you believe that Bin Laden was "hiding" in this compound and that nobody in the Pakistani government was aware of and complicit in his being there, you’re dumber than a box of rocks. Even Dianne Feinstein, who I have little respect for, has come to the same conclusion:
Telling a group of reporters the Senate Intelligence committee has been briefed on bin Laden’s possible whereabouts for some time, she said, “The fact that it didn’t leak is really special and shows that each member is carrying out its duties.”
Feinstein, the chair of the committee, revealed, “It appears Osama bin Laden and his family could have lived there up to six years … Because this compound had been around and that’s the belief.”
Read that carefully folks. In fact, read that entire article carefully. It’s short. Read it several times if you have to, and let it sink in.
The Pakistani government is allegedly a "friend" of ours. We provide them with funds and other forms of assistance, and yet the fact of the matter is that the evidence is clear and convincing that the Pakistanis were both taking our funds and shaking our hands while at the same time sheltering the man who was involved in bending America over the table.
These people are not our friends. Feinstein talks about "making contributions" to Pakistan and "rethinking" that. I’d go further: I’d declare them a rogue nationand forbid all business and political contacts with them. I’d expel all Pakistani citizens from the US. I’d force their ambassadors out, and recall ours. Yes, I understand the principle of "engagement" and I’m well-aware that they have nuclear weapons – and not just one or two of them either. But there are times to take a stand, and under the law if I harbor a fugitive in this country I find myself on the wrong end of a felony charge.
No folks, this isn’t over. Our nation hasn’t been restored to where it was in terms of liberty. We didn’t win the war, by our own declaration or otherwise. And while I’m glad that evil SOB is dead, this event asks more questions than it answers – particularly in the timing of the assault.
The mettle of our current Administration when it comes to foreign policy is now under test. We cannot declare a nation "friend" and provide them billions in assistance, both financially and otherwise, when they harbor the singular most-wanted individual that’s on our national "get him" list.
And we cannot declare a reason for celebrating in the streets until we retrieve the liberties that we have deposited in a dirty toilet, rinse them off and restore them to their rightful place within our Constitution.
