Updates coming ...
8:11pm PST: CNN's report: "Osama bin Laden is dead, sources say." A live feed for the president's address at CNN's homepage.
8:25pm PST: Bethany Murphy tweets: "Okay, this made me cry. Thank you George W. Bush. G-d bless you:
8:25pm PST: Bethany Murphy tweets: "Okay, this made me cry. Thank you George W. Bush. G-d bless you:
8:45pm PST: The president just spoke. It was a good speech. I'll be checking around from some analysis and will update. There's a feeling of celebration, obviously, but deliverance as well. The president closed his address with the unifying conclusion to the Pledge of Allegiance: "... one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."
9:00pm PST: Bruce Kesler comments, at Maggie's Farm, "President Obama's Mushy Announcment That Osama Bin Laden Is Dead."
9:05pm PST: Via Blake Hounshell on Twitter, a Facebook page in Arabic, "We are all Osama Bin Laden."
9:30pm PST: Checking some progressives on Twitter, Karoli's not pleased with the response on the right.
9:37pm PST: Here's the president's address:And at New York Times, "Obituary: Osama bin Laden was the Most Wanted Face of Terrorism."10:30pm PST: Lots of stuff becoming available.
* At New York Times, "How the bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out," and check this striking image from the Times.
* At ABC News, "Osama Bin Laden Killed By Navy Seals in Firefight."
* At National Journal, "Osama’s compound already mapped on Google Maps."
* And at Los Angeles Times, "Former president George W. Bush calls bin Laden death 'momentous achievement'."
11:05pm PST: Glenn Reynolds has a roundup, and note this from Austin Bay:
Would that we had him in Fall 2001. However, time has worked against Bin Laden. He dies tarnished. A man who hides in a cave for ten years is no martyr. He quickly lost the aura of divine sanction — he was driven out of Afghanistan, and the US stayed. Moreover, the US took it’s counter-terror war into the heart of the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim world. What’s the choice between tyrant and terrorist? Iraq provides a choice. Al Qaeda made Iraq a battleground and lost — lost to the Iraqi people and the US.
So we are supposed to believe that the wealthiest murderer in history, who loved nothing more than making videos of himself threatening to blow up this or that, then pack it off to his friends at Al Jazeera, did not have access to a video camera since 2002, even though the Pakistanis reportedly built a compound for him sometime around 2005.
ReplyDeleteOsama wasn't exactly holed up in a cave with no electricity or running watter.
Osama was his own favorite video star, and those tapes stopped coming for one of two reasons:
1) He voluntarily stopped producing them,or-
2) He was no-longer able to produce them.
Last week, it was the release of yet another COLB, which most are taking as the gospel, and now this.
I don't know, but something about all this just doesn't feel right to me.
Maybe it's that I trust this White House about as far as I could push it.
-Dave
Dave is right. I'm not gonna believe this until they produce Osama's long form death certificate...
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't really matter what Obama does or doesn't do with you people, does it? You first start with the position that he's completely wrong and evil and then work back from there. How formulaic.
America scored a huge victory today, Dave. How about not acting like an asshole for five minutes and enjoying it with the rest of us, huh?
I saw you bragging about being too timid to bet me on the outcome of last years election (a bet you would have won) on another post about me, Don. Savvy. Obama just had a bullet put between Osama bin Laden's eyes and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. Have your checkbook ready come November 2012, chief.