I admit to having felt a sense of completion on hearing the news that our Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden. But I wish we'd had a little more time to bear witness to the good news.
It took less than 24 hours for the ideological noise machine to crank up and deconstruct the event with ad hominem arguments against the president, and to shift the conversation away from how justice was done to outrage that the Obama administration is not sufficiently committed to torture, or to continuing the occupation of Afghanistan until world without end amen.
The entire point of these arguments is to score political points against the Obama administration and to diffuse any sense of unity or commodity we might experience as a people. These arguers are so clearly prisoners of ideology they would poison the last well in the last desert rather than share a drop of water with a non-ditto head.
Among the canards advanced by this cabal of haters is the possibility that Eric Holder, the Attorney General, will file murder charges against our Navy Seals for killing bin Laden. This possibility is held out there because some administration officials believe that the war on terrorism would be more effectively waged by a criminal justice strategy rather than through continued military intervention.
That these nattering nabobs of negativism could tell a lie so palpable, so outrageous, so indecent, is breathtaking for its nihilism. It makes the lies they told about the President's religious faith and about his place of birth pale by comparison. These guttersnipes have no place in public discourse.
There is much about the Obama administration that needs criticism, correction, and confrontation. His handling of our economic problems has been uninspired and frankly, pedestrian. He has utterly failed to produce a coherent energy plan, to recognize devolution of the middle class, or to even acknowledge the historic and democratic impulses of the people in the Mideast.
But for now, for his realization of what it means to be Commander-in-Chief, he deserves our collective thanks and appreciation for a mission courageously accomplished.