Keith Olbermann Special Comment The Death of Osama Bin Laden

A Special Comment:
The Death of Osama bin Laden

Obama and the Democrats did what the republicans refused to do or tried but failed just incompetent .
Now they are forced to take Obama seriously  and give him his due or will they continue to argue that Obama was successful because of the work of the Bush administration and its policies such as its pro-torture policy  Waterboarding et al. its war in Iraq the loss of a half-million or so unarmed  Iraqi citizens and 6,000 Americans- So was it all worth it or is there just more on the way as the US  slips stealthily or creeps  into Libya  .

By Keith Olbermann

“Torture was necessary, laws were not,” he summed up. But “the ordinary rules prevailed, and triumphed.”

Posted May 04, 2011

and as William Rivers Pitt rather bruntly puts it:

"...After 9/11, much of the country went collectively crazy with fear and rage, and the members of George W. Bush's administration capitalized on that to great and terrible effect."

Now What? by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout May 4, 2011


"We need to counteract the shockwave of the evil-doer by having individual rate cuts accelerated, and by thinking about tax rebates."

- George W. Bush, October 2001

I do not mean by this to say that we must promise to stop terrorism. That would be nice - incredible, actually - but it isn't going to happen any time soon. Ten decades of ruthless American foreign policy have spawned a host of implacable foes, and they are not going to close up shop because Osama bin Laden now sleeps with the fishes. His acolytes have promised retribution, and they very well may keep their word. In the end, terrorism is something we must all live with for now, until the day comes when we make the collective, democratic decision to change the way we operate in the world. Terrorism is not all our fault, but we bear a substantial portion of the burden that has been imposed upon us. Intelligence types call it "blowback," and thanks to so many wretched decisions made in our past, it is going to keep blowing for at least the foreseeable future.

Call me a cynic or an America-hater (and how's that for a G.W. Bush flashback), but it is what it is. After the euphoria of the moment passed, I found myself awash in deep feelings of woe and regret. Not over bin Laden himself or the manner of his end, but over the utterly ruinous decade that was allowed to transpire under the banner of "getting him," and over the equally ruinous and painful days that are still to come.

After 9/11, much of the country went collectively crazy with fear and rage, and the members of George W. Bush's administration capitalized on that to great and terrible effect. They knew exactly what they were doing, right down to the facile "terror alerts" they would vomit on us whenever they found themselves in a political corner. They lied about bin Laden connections and WMD in Iraq to promote an invasion that made their rich friends even richer while killing a lot of people, and drove the nation down into the ditch. They used that horrible day against us, deliberately and with intent. All you hear from the media since bin Laden was killed is how "united" we were after 9/11, but I don't remember feeling that unity. I remember thinking we were reacting to that event in exactly the wrong way - with the PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act, the gutting of essential rights, and the calamitous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan - and being told I was not a real American for my trouble.