House of Eratosthenes

I’d like to know what the “no” people are thinking. Seems to be typical liberal stuff — I don’t want to see it, therefore they shouldn’t be in view anywhere. In other words, looking away is simply not an option. You know what they say…”If a conservative doesn’t like a radio station he turns the dial, if a liberal doesn’t like a radio station he wants it banned.”

Wall Street Journal is wondering if the Bush administration should get some credit for finding bin Laden so he could be killed. Over on FARK, there were 141 comments about fifteen minutes ago and as of this writing there are 377. Mmmm yes…FARK kids…I’m sure they’re going to weigh the evidence, evaluate both sides fairly and come to a reasoned decision on this.

More Hello Kitty of Blogging wisdom from Yours Truly:

If you can use time as an excuse for Obama, as in “He still needs time to fix” blah blah blah blah…then Bush gets to use the same excuse, as in “It took more than eight years to use OUR intelligence to bring down bin Laden.” Can’t have it both ways.

If this was fiction with no parallel with reality, I would have guessed the job of finding bin Laden and putting a slug between his eyes…at somewhere between two and three years. Pretty close to what it took President Obama’s administration. But it’s pretty clear He didn’t start from scratch, and it’s therefore pretty clear this is a much more involved and complicated task, full of false leads. My two-year guess would be exceptionally weak, I wouldn’t have put any “gonna feel that” money on it at all. None. I can see it taking a decade of steady, incremental progress.

Hey, timelines are hard. Sixty-some years from the maiden flight of a heavier-than-air vessel, to a successful moonshot, and then another forty years of not quite being able to get around to doing it again. A full decade to send bin Laden to meet Allah? I can certainly see it.

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, EIT for short, has been shown to be part of it — I don’t hear anyone, anywhere, in a position of knowledge, saying otherwise. Assassination, reprehensible in any form to the extremist left in America that forms Obama’s base, was undoubtedly a part of it. It’s a core piece of the official narrative. “Kill, not capture.”

No matter who you choose to believe, this ends up being just another revolution on the merry-go-round of “When liberals absolutely positively have to deliver results, they make their decisions the way conservatives do.”

Hey, that would be a decent slogan for 2012. Wonder how much intel we’d have on bin Laden if Al Gore was our President when the towers came down?

Update: Drudge is reporting Obama has decided to release one photo. Just heard the guys on the radio report on this as well.

If that is true, this means we are going to have conspiracy theories. It can’t go any other way. There are n photos, Obama has decided to release one, and n>1. And so there is going to be speculation about what is in the (n-1) photos.

Obama’s bump in the polls — and let’s be clear about this, it is well-deserved — is going to be over pretty soon, I think. If I were an Obama fan I’d be coming off it right about now. There will be conspiracy theories about the photos because Obama’s releasing only one, or a selected subset anyway. If Obama cannot see this coming, He’s an idiot. If He can, then He’s a manipulator. But also, there’s this “when and if they decide to release it” business. What they mean by that is when/if He decides to release it…

It all seems so imperious and imperial. This one guy, this Man-God-King guy, decides moment to moment how the public’s right to know is to be interpreted. Anyone who disagrees is called a racist.

Conspiracy theories? Really?
Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me…

It took “this long” for the potential consequences of political expedience of a desperate “Hail Mary” play to fall below the consequence of a National, and international, view of Mr. Obama (and his entire cast of assigned cabinet) as an unworthy “investment”?

The (field promoted) General, recently promoted to head CIA, finally pulled his “sleeve” card to make a “really big splash” on the world stage?

Well, that’s it then. I guess all the boots on the ground can march to another spot in the sand box then.
Heaven knows where we’d put ’em in the economy if they all came home at once
and, um…voted, without impediment.
- CaptDMO | 05/03/2011 @ 08:48
If you can use time as an excuse for Obama, as in “He still needs time to fix” blah blah blah blah…then Bush gets to use the same excuse, as in “It took more than eight years to use OUR intelligence to bring down bin Laden.”

Oh, it’s worse than that. I’m still waiting for someone to say, “Well, if Obama gets to blame all his failures on Bush, then Bush should get to say, ‘You know, if Clinton had taken custody of that Bin Laden fellow when the Sudanese tried to give him to us, the Twin Towers might never have been hit in the first place, much less the US found it necessary to launch two wars in the Middle East based in part on looking for the rat bastard.'”
- cylarz | 05/04/2011 @ 01:39
After I’d been in network security for awhile, back when we were passing laws and regulations about it like mad and it had some sexiness and sizzle and currency — I began to notice an overarching theme in those places where theory & reality met up and worked well together. In all the really effective security practices. I think this remains true of anything security-related:

It comes down to doing what your Mom told you to do when she was nagging at you to clean your room. Pick shit up and move it to where it belongs. If you put the food away and wipe the counter, for example, you’re much less likely to have an ant problem. All effective security relies on a profile, and a profile relies on “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t come up with a good workable security profile for a mess. So first step is get rid of the mess.

I like what’s going on with the bin Laden thing, even if it means Obama gets enough credit — even if He gets a second political life out of this, and maybe a real shot at re-election (shudder). Because now, at least, it’s “cool” to at least put some thought into picking shit up and putting it away. Don’t leave these loose ends flapping in the wind.

Because hey, that’s three thousand people who’d be alive today, if this was as cool fifteen yeas ago as it is now. It’s always a problem with these elective offices, not just POTUS, this temptation to say “Oh well, my successor will have to deal with this what do I care.” My hope is that there’s now a real disincentive against this kind of thinking, that would be good.
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2011 @ 01:49
I like what’s going on with the bin Laden thing, even if it means Obama gets enough credit — even if He gets a second political life out of this, and maybe a real shot at re-election (shudder)

I’m not worried about that. Rush has been saying that you can’t put Bin Laden in your gas tank. He then said that Chairman Zero’s crummy poll numbers of late aren’t due to his failure to catch Bin Laden before now. They’re due to $5 gas and a bunch of other serious problems plaguing ordinary Americans, most of them directly related to the economy. I think he added that Boy Wonder got a whole 1-point bump in polling after the news broke.

“But he got Bin Laden!” isn’t going to save him next November.
- cylarz | 05/04/2011 @ 01:56
On the bright side, we can now say to the left, “It seems there is a military solution to terrorism after all.”
- cylarz | 05/04/2011 @ 01:58
I dunno, look at it from BHO’s perspective. He was hurtin’ before Sunday because, up to that point, it could be truthfully said “While you’re churning and burning and grinding your mental gears trying to come up with a coherent statement of what is unique & special about OBozo, lefty, just bear in mind that whatever that is it hasn’t done us one bit of good.” The air was thick with comparisons to Jimmy Carter. They didn’t want to admit it, but that would’ve hurt Him a whole lot. Carter talked about “hope” too, you know. There was a lot more excitement to him than just “he doesn’t have anything to do with Watergate.”

I still don’t know if I’d bet money on Obama’s re-election. But He’s really pulled His head out of a noo- um, whoops, I mean He’s really pulled His head off a chopping block. Once you acknowledge He was in trouble before, you have to also acknowledge this success improved His position by giving Him something to brag about. He didn’t have anything. Just health care. Who’d want to run for re-election on that?

But “Can’t put Osama bin Laden in your gas tank” is an awesome bumper sticker slogan.

(Never understood the racial aspect of a hanging by the way…I know the KKK did it and all, but if you’re a white guy and you’re strung up on a rope, it’s still lethal to you isn’t it? I saw them do it on the pilot episode of Deadwood.)
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2011 @ 08:41
^ I’m going to have to retract much of the 08:41 comment, because of this.

Things keep going the way they’ve been going throughout today, Obama stands a slimmer chance of re-election than He had before the first Black Hawk took off for the compound. What a schmuck.
- mkfreeberg | 05/04/2011 @ 13:37

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Should the Government Release Pictures of bin Laden’s Body?Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Should the Government Release Pictures of bin Laden’s Body?
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011