osama bin laden deadFollow

Just looking through CNN and these two popped up:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/07/afghanistan.taliban.bin.laden/

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/06/pakistan.bin.laden/index.html?hpt=T2

I would assume both the Taliban and Al'Qaeda confirmation would be enough. Probably not enough for the deathers though, at least until they see the body in person.

Well, why don't we just send all the Deathers to the bottom of the Arabian Sea so they can look for themselves.

Lulz.

Meant to reply to this last week, so here:



That's a gross misinterpretation of what was said. He did not say that he wouldn't send special ops into Pakistan without permission. He said that it was irresponsible for a candidate to say that he would ahead of time. His statement to Larry King that he "wouldn't go there" is about not answering the question because Pakistan is a sovereign nation, not about whether he would or wouldn't order such a thing if it was warranted.

His point then, and the reason Obama was criticized about this, is that it's wrong for a presidential candidate to make such a proclamation. What you don't want to have happen is for a president to be sitting in the situation room with a set of decisions before him with serious political and human life ramifications factoring a statement he made to an interviewer while running for office 3 years earlier into his decision making process. That was the reason for the criticism of Obama's statement. It was not about whether we should or should not take the very action he was proposing (duh!), but about whether we should be saying what we would do in said future hypothetical situation ahead of time.

Edited, May 9th 2011 6:03pm by gbaji

When I look at the word osama I sometimes see the word obama... terrible but it is my brain's fault:

And yet it worked. Really well, too.

How dare a politician make a claim and follow through with it!

It's not about the specific question. Any president of any party would have done the exact same thing Obama did under those circumstances. Is anyone seriously suggesting otherwise?

It's about the stupidity of answering the question in the first place. Because what if the next interviewer asks a question that isn't so obvious and easy? What if he follows up with a question like "Ok. What if you had actionable intelligence that OBL was hiding in the UK?", or "What if he's hiding in China?". Now what does he do? Say that he wouldn't order an attack? Does the interviewer then get to go through the entire list of nations of the world and force the president to tell us all which countries he'd be willing to invade to kill a top Al-queda member and which he wouldn't?


It's just a dumb thing to do. Everyone else in the political arena understood this. Obama didn't. He's fortunately learned since then, but it was absolutely correct to criticize him for saying it.

Except that he wasn't lying. And his ratings have jumped because of it.

And McCain's response was that OBL wasn't a priority. He didn't say "only if we had sufficient evidence." He said he wouldn't do it. Stop acting like he just declined to answer the question. He DID answer it--he said no.

If he was hiding in the UK, I have no trouble believing we wouldn't have needed to go in and get him. He'd be just as dead with different shooters.

Pretty much. The Pakistan question was a question because the Pakistan-US "alliance" under Bush was a complete joke and foreign aid boondoggle. It's still a joke but Obama has done dramatically more to get a little value out of our billions in aid than his predecessor.

Edited, May 10th 2011 4:06pm by Jophiel

Pakistan and the UK aren't equivalents.