This hasn’t been a good week.
Oh, to be sure, the news that Osama bin Laden is now Arabian Sea lobster food was fantastic. But on at least two occasions I found myself forced to actually indicate approval — if not praise — of the actions taken by Barack Obama.
Why, on one occasion I even found myself referring to him as “President” Barack Obama, and those are three words that I don’t think I’ve strung together in writing or in speech in well over a year. My gag reflexes just aren’t that strong.
The first occasion for grudging praise was to congratulate Obama for approving the raid in the first place. There may have been strong suspicions that bin Laden was in that compound, but there was no solid proof. There were no pictures and no communications to or from OBL that proved his presence. Obama is now deeply immersed in campaign mode, having figured out that people like Obama-the-candidate much more than they like Obama-the-president.
This operation could have gone haywire in several ways: Just ask Jimmy Carter and review the “Black Hawk Down” story. We could have lost some of our Navy SEALs and come back empty handed. It is certain that Obama’s handlers told him that if this effort failed it is very likely that his re-election effort would fail as well.
Fair or not, the failure would come to rest in the Oval Office, and Americans don’t like failures. For a true leader this decision would not have been a difficult one; but for someone in campaign and not leadership mode it was more difficult. Obama made the right choice, and for that I held my nose and said “well done.”
Then I had to praise Obama for his decision not to release picture of OBL’s body. Sure, this question should have been addressed and decided upon as the mission was being planned, or in the approximately nine hours between execution and public knowledge. But Obama did finally make the decision, and it was the right one.
Can you prove OBL is dead with a picture? No. Why? Photoshop! A sixth-grader with a PC could take a picture of a linebacker from a high school football game in West Texas and in 50 seconds make that player look like he was lying on bin Laden’s bed with half of his skull blown off by a Navy SEAL bullet. If Obama had released a picture of bin Laden there would be YouTube videos and PowerPoint presentations on the Web in less than an hour showing how those pictures were almost certainly faked. The picture would prove nothing.
So, without the picture how do we really know bin Laden is dead? Simple. If he were not you can be sure he would quickly show up in a video reading the comics out of the Sunday AJC. At that point Obama’s re-election effort is over and Hillary Clinton starts writing her convention acceptance speech. And it all probably became academic Friday, when even al-Qaida confirmed that OBL was dead.
This story has a quick half-life and little, if any, bump in the polls for Obama.
Consider, if you will:
Osama bin Laden’s death isn’t going to pay off a dollar of our national debt, nor is it going to significantly lower of our deficit.
Two bullets in bin Laden’s body aren’t going to create jobs or help Americans save their homes from foreclosure.
Obama’s burial at sea isn’t magically going to lead to a discovery of vast new undersea oil reserves that will ease the pain of record-high gas prices.
Obama’s failure to find bin Laden didn’t cause his negative approval numbers, and sending bin Laden to his eternal celestial water bed is not going to permanently bring them back.
Listen to Neal Boortz live from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays on AM 750 and 95.5FM News/Talk WSB.
His column appears every Saturday. For more Boortz, go to boortz.com
