PrintMay 6, 2011
Of Course We Should See the Photo
Of course we have the right to see it. We all are the victims. The killing of Osama bin Laden last weekend was a seminal moment in a War on Terror that has encompassed all 300 million Americans. The 9-11 attack was not some isolated crime against a certain person - and it was not in fact an attack simply on New York City any more than Pearl Harbor was an attack on merely Hawaii.
It was an attack on the United States and in fact all of the liberty loving peoples across the entire world. And as a result of 9-11, all of us in the United States have helped to pay for all of the efforts over ten years that led to Sunday's events, and as paying customers, we have the right to see what we've paid for.
Anyone who has had to smoke a cigarette after going through the security line at the airport deserves an autographed copy in fact. The payment in surrendered liberty is as bad, or worse, than the financial end of it.
And those who helped pay for it, but choose not to view the photo, have that right as well. But we all have earned the right to make that decision ourselves.
Moreover, we simply do not have to accept being told to "sit down, shut up, and trust us" from a bungling administration that one the one hand says it was brilliant enough to use a surgical Navy SEAL strike team so as not to destroy the evidence -- and yet turned right around and destroyed the evidence. Anyone who can say that with a straight face absolutely deserves to be doubted, questioned and chastised. You have just insulted our intelligence, and we're calling you on it.
Nor do we have to buy the flimsy argument that releasing the photo will "inflame the passions of the Middle East." Not only is our "give a damn" broken with regard to that argument, it also lacks any logical basis. How in the world are adults supposed to process the idea that blowing Osama's head off is ok, but showing a photograph of it is going to really tick them off?
That is so childish and illogical as to boggle the adult mind.
This argument is related to the "spike the ball" argument the administration has come out with, interrupting their own nauseating 72 hour ball spike-a-thon. Obama spiked the ball Sunday night with all of his I, I, I, me, me, me stuff. He spiked it by not thanking the Bush Cheney administration for the efforts they started that led to this very accomplishment.
He spiked it again with that moronic "action photo" of our super hero's watching the operation go down live - which ended up being a fake. He has reveled in the liberal media's multiple sycophantic spikes and Michelle spiked it with her boogey down for the camera's also. And of course, he spiked it one more time at Ground Zero - the first time he's paid attention to that site since advocating for the Ground Zero Mosque.
In other words, Obama is all about spiking it in the face of conservatives -- he just won't spike it in front of the Muslim world. Bottom line? I am not buying the spike argument. Actually, I resent it.
And then there's the sticky little issue that a lot of folks, including many Muslims, are not going to believe that bin Laden is dead. So what I want to know is, why is worrying about their sensibilities so paramount yet not at all important to consider their doubts? It makes zero sense.
Frankly, there are many others who have always claimed that he died near Tora Bora years ago, along with some little nagging doubts from folks who really do want to believe the administration but simply cannot stop asking themselves "why." (I've started to wrestle with that Tora Bora argument myself. There are a lot of non-kooks who have always maintained that.)
None of this kind of second-guessing should be going on. This is an unforced error on the administration's part that is so unnecessary. The CIA and the Special Forces did the heavy lifting. They did the impossible. Can't we expect a modicum of middle school common sense from the politicians, especially when one of them is the most brilliant man to trod the political soil in American history?
I guess not. But we should still demand it nonetheless. This decision is condescending, elitist, nonsensical and fraught with problems in the months and years ahead. It could be ended in a minute's time with a simple release -- and doesn't that sound familiar?
