House of Eratosthenes

A popular talking point among the GOP has surfaced in response to the President’s “gutsy” call to take out Osama bin Laden, and it goes something like “well, what kind of idiot would have made any other call?”

It’s popular because it makes an important point that is forgotten all too often, which in turn means something. President Obama’s greatest achievement, ever, is now defined and crystallized. He is never going to top this one, and what it says about Him is — not a whole lot, when you get down to it. You can’t point to an Obama policy that started a chain of events culminating in the death of bin Laden. But you can certainly point to a lot of such policies of His predecessor, that guy He castigated over and over again on the campaign trail, and over and over again after He was inaugurated and started His “rule,” as if He was still campaigning.

So Obama takes credit for policies that not only are on the outside of anything He ever would have enacted, anytime, anyplace, ever…He also takes credit for policies He repeatedly spoke out against, even after He was sworn in and there should have been no further need to campaign. When He was supposed to have been so busy doing His job that there shouldn’t have been any time for campaigning for a job He already had. In fact it’s fair to say He neglected that job so He could take time out of it — inexplicably — to campaign for it.

Had He spent more time making decisions in that job & following up on those decisions, rather than campaigning for the job as if He didn’t have it yet when He actually did…a lot of those policies, which culminated in the death of bin Laden and thus the beneficial result, probably would no longer have been in force. In this way, the talking point is a powerful and persuasive argument — although it probably requires a much greater attention span to receive all of it, in the case of anyone outside the audience of those who really need to hear it.

But you know what? Now the talking point has an answer. President of the United States Ron Paul.

Ron Paul says he would not have authorized the mission that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, and that President Barack Obama should have worked with the Pakistani government instead of authorizing a raid.

“I think things could have been done somewhat differently,” Paul said this week. “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?”

Asked by WHO Radio’s Simon Conway whether he would have given the go-ahead to kill bin Laden if it meant entering another country, Paul shot back that it “absolutely was not necessary.”

“I don’t think it was necessary, no. It absolutely was not necessary,” Paul said during his Tuesday comments. “I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he’d been in a hotel in London? We wanted to keep it secret, so would we have sent the airplane, you know the helicopters into London, because they were afraid the information would get out?”

The Ron Paul Apologia Squad is aptly represented in the comment section, I see. But I have yet to see a single comment say something to the effect of “When Bush went in and got Saddam Hussein back in ’03, that’s the way we should have done it.” See, if you’re really going to do something about a problem and discard the option of “ostrich diplomacy” sticking your head in the ground and hoping the problem goes away — you want to do something about it — then it’s one or the other. You work your way through the bad-guy military one flank at a time, which means body bags; or you send an elite squad in to make a neat little hole in the BigBad’s head.

This is why I find it hard to respect the Ron Paul movement; or, for that matter, those who support that movement. If these people are being sincere in discussing how decisions should be made at the top of our government, by which I mean they’re conducting their own lives in a manner consistent with the way they want these decisions to be made — then, they must not be capable of making decisions, since they cannot meaningfully comprehend the list of available options.

We’ve got a lot of people running around with this problem, I notice. They aren’t all Ron Paul fans. They like to speechify, and they can do a grand job of doing it, against some decision someone else made. But they can’t pick something themselves, and what’s worse, they don’t seem to care.

Just speaking for myself, if both options are available, I like Obama’s solution much better. People in the military are, generally speaking, about half my age or less than that. I like seeing them live. And I like seeing bad people humiliated as they’re taken down, by being taken down without too much of a fuss. Many’s the time I said, before Saddam was taken down, that that’s what should happen to him. One bullet, a .22 short, and save the casing. Then let it be said that the terror that is the regime of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, was taken down by a bullet thiiiiiiiis big. That would have been ideal. Plate that puppy in 22k gold and display it in the Smithsonian.

Yes, this leads to a debate about whether the .22 short can be lethal. It should be considered as such, in the sense that proper safety on the range (where the .22 short is used most often, I expect) demands that all projectiles be considered potentially lethal. But in a highly coordinated move on a compound based on a decade of accumulated intelligence work, would you use one where it counts, with no second-chances…custom-made, sharpened, depleted-uranium slug? With some snarky insult chiseled on it. Can you fire DU with the measure of gunpowder in a .22 short cartridge? That debate becomes more technically involved than it’s worth. Still a fun thing to think about.

Back to the subject at hand. It’s still a valid talking point the Republicans have. Obama is in a precarious position with this business about “I’m the badass who who took down bin Laden” propaganda gravy train, because the facts say His singularly greatest achievement anywhere is something He got done by staying out of the way, letting better men getting the work done, and being the meaningless figurehead who just happened to have been in charge when it went down. If you really want to dig for something He did that led to the good results, you end up with a bunch of broken promises. He was supposed to shut down Guantanamo but didn’t; He was supposed to stop the War on Terror but didn’t; He was supposed to “change” this, that, or some other silly thing, but didn’t.

You want to have your singularly greatest achievement within this earthly existence, ever, accomplished in such a way? Again, I must confine my remarks to my own personal situation and speak solely for myself. But no. A decisive negatori on that.

Be all that as it may: Going forward, let us not call this “what idiot would’ve” argument unanswerable…for it has been answered. There is an idiot who would have made another call.

Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Honestly, I hope Ron Paul keeps riding that hobbyhorse right through primary season. “We should’ve asked our good buddies the Pakistanis to put the cuffs on Osama” is not going to play well with the conservative base (or, really, with anybody outside of the Boston-Austin-Berkeley axis). Given that our dear friends in the media will be pimping Ron Paul as a super-awesome GOP candidate for all they’re worth (remember how he was Salon.com’s favorite person in the whole wide world for about a month there in 2004?), anything that exposes him for the ideologically blinkered retard he is is gravy.
- Severian | 05/12/2011 @ 09:55
Well spoken Morgan, and well spoken, Severian.

For additional insight on Obama’s “gutsy” calls, I refer you to Ann Coulter’s latest column:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=43461

Can’t really think of anything to add, either to Ann’s column or to yours, Morgan.

As for Ron Paul, I’m just sick of hearing about him. It’s one of those names that just makes my skin crawl at election time, particularly when spoken by fellow conservatives or Republicans. It’s one of several names that I did not even want to hear back in 2008, much less now. You’ve got RINO squishes like Mitt Romney, for instance…

…and then there’s RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL! I mean, maybe if we say his name enough times over and over and loudly enough, people will take him seriously as a presidential candidate. Right?
- cylarz | 05/12/2011 @ 10:53
In his way, Ron Paul is as much a media creation as Obama is.

He’s the media’s favorite “Republican,” in that he’s a) totally embarrassing, b) gets headlines, and c) as a consequence of a and b, has all the worst elements of the fever-swamp “right” supporting him — crazed Randroids, Stormfront, the neo-Confederates, etc. You know, the real representatives of Conservatism in America(tm).

Thus, he gets treated as a serious GOP contender by the media.

Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich — whose actual views are orders of magnitude closer to the honest-to-god worldview of the left than Paul’s are to the right — gets zero screen time. Seriously: I threw “Ron Paul” and “Dennis Kucinich” through Lexis/Nexis back in the early 2004 presidential primaries. It was like an 8:1 difference in coverage.

Fucking media scum.
- Severian | 05/12/2011 @ 12:58
From my Fox News link on my Facebook page: “Rep. Ron Paul officially launches his 2012 presidential
campaign. Tune in to Fox News Sunday this weekend for an exclusive interview. Check your local listings to find Fox News Sunday in your area.”

As Rush would say, “Yip, yip, yip, yahoo.”

Sigh.
- cylarz | 05/13/2011 @ 06:06

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A Republican Talking Point is AnsweredThursday, May 12th, 2011

A Republican Talking Point is Answered
Thursday, May 12th, 2011