Obama made the right decision

We know now that President Obama has decided not to release the photographs of Osama bin Laden, and I think he made the right decision.



It's tempting to say that it's the right decision just because former half-term Alsaka governor Sarah Palin thinks it isn't, but there are better reasons than that.

My thoughts:

1. People already know we've killed him. Showing the pictures will make him more of a martyr than they already consider him.

2. Releasing the photos won't convince anybody. The people who don't believe bin Laden was killed Sunday are the same ones who have looked at a million copies of Obama's official birth certificate and decided it was a fake, while concluding that an obvious forgery was his actual birth certificate from Kenya. What are the odds they won't claim that any bin Laden death photos aren't faked?

3. This isn't like Abu Ghraib; the disclosure of those photos was needed to tell the truth to the American people and the world. Here there is no good-faith question of what happened, nothing to prove.

4. We're better than that. Civilized people are rightly repelled by the barbaric display of the heads of vanquished enemies. We have the opportunity to rise above the baser voices calling for a bloodthirsty display of the corpse of a man who amply deserved his fate. We don't display body trophies.

What was Loughner thinking?

We've seen a rapid swing on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, from the initial charges on the left that the shooter was encouraged by wild rhetoric from the extreme right, to an almost immediate backlash from the wingers who denied that he was motivated by right-wing views, to even claiming that he is a leftist.

Now we have a report that examines the actual content of his writings and guess what: his writings are saturated by some of the most extreme, right-wing anti-government ideas, conspiracy theories, and lots of pet claims by the extreme right (denial of the legitimacy of paper money, for instance).

Is this a claim that he was acting at the direction of Sarah "Crosshairs" Palin? No. I'll stipulate that Crosshairs wasn't seriously trying to provoke an assassination attempt when she published her violent campaign poster.

But there is no question that, to the extent Loughner's writings set forth any political ideology, it is the ideology of the extreme right.

The Associated Press: Running Scared

It's been just a week, and we've gone from an outcry against the violent rhetoric of the extreme right to an equally rapid backlash, with "responsible" opinion cautioning against blaming the right-wingers for talk about crosshairs, reloading, and being armed and dangerous.

Now that backlash appears to be infecting our news coverage.

Today the Associated Press ran a story about a former Congressional candidate facing criminal charges for threats against Indiana judges.

Here's how the AP describes the defendant:

A woman who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress last year

What party, you might ask, was this woman a member of? Well you might as, but in the AP coverage you will never find out, because her party affiliation appears nowhere in the story.

If you're interested, she's a Republican.

But apparently, we're not allowed to say, or even know, the party affiliation of someone who engages in violent rhetoric.

That would be irresponsible.

Sarah Palin, Postscript

Jeez, do we have to talk about that again?

Well, maybe this one more time, so I'll make it quick.

People from all ends of the political spectrum have now come out to defend poor Sarah and her daughter, and how awful it was for Dave Letterman to say something disrespectful about her.

I won't bother to talk about how she made her family her most visible campaign accessory. You already know that.



I will just mention one other thing: When she first went on the air to complain about the Top Ten, she didn't say anything about the "knocked up" joke. She was all about the "slutty stewardess" joke. It wasn't until later last week that she started complaining about the joke about her daughter. People are arguing about whether her outrage was genuine or put on, and they're entitled to their opinions. On the other hand, if that was her true reaction, don't you think we would have heard about it right away, and not after she had the chance to try out the outrage, version one, on TV?

So maybe it's true that she was personally offended by Dave's "knocked up" joke, maybe. Doesn't it seem at least as likely, though, that it was her fallback option after the "slutty stewardess" outrage wasn't getting her enough mileage?