Your Spectacularly Stupid Bin Laden Post of the Day

As one might expect there are many of them, but the Progressive's laughable exercise in incoherent emoting probably deserves the Grand Jury Award. Let's go to the tape!

What bin Laden did was to use violence as a ready tool to advance his purposes.

What bin Laden did was to wantonly sacrifice the lives of innocent people in service of those purposes. [...]

In this regard, bin Laden is no different a mass murderer than Lyndon Johnson was in Vietnam.

In this regard, bin Laden is no different a mass murderer than George W. Bush was in Iraq.

Oh, there is one big difference: bin Laden killed far fewer innocent people than any of those U.S. Presidents.

The thing I love most about this nonsense is that Rothschild does his damnedest to promote the idea that an evil deed is an evil deed no matter how large or small only to destroy the very framework of his argument at the very end. He want the reader to believe that past American presidents are really no better than bin Laden because they too used violence. Then he tries a judo toss of logic designed to make the reader think that U.S. presidents are actually worse than bin Laden by virtue of the magnitude of their evil deeds. But the only person who ends up on the floor is Rothschild because he essentially pulls the rug out from beneath his own argument.

It's like he's taking aim at a target with a canon only to remove the canon from the equation right before he fires (but that might be too violent an analogy, natch).

Before we move on, I should point out that Rothschild isn't very clear, and probably intentionally so, about what the "mass murder" he is referring to here. Was it the raid that occurred last night, or the aggregate US military action over the course of the last decade? I imagine that Rothschild would like the reader to think of the two as being one in the same, but -- and let's face it -- what instigated the piece was the killing of bin Laden last night. He was considered a fugitive, was being hunted by militaries and law enforcement agencies from around the world and, this is the most important part, had ample opportunity to turn himself in and demonstrate his innocence in any number of legal systems. He not only chose not to, but continued to flaunt his behavior so as to continue to encourage violence.

Until we renounce violence as a convenient tool, until we stop sacrificing innocent lives, until we no longer excuse the mass murder that our own government commits, we’re not in much of a position to celebrate.

I really don't even know what this sentence means. It's such a sweeping statement that it is almost rendered meaningless.

And spare me Obama’s talk of “justice” being done. That’s exactly the same phrase Bush used after U.S. forces gunned down Saddam Hussein’s sadistic sons, Uday and Qusay.

It’s not “justice,” as we’ve come to revere it in this country: a system that upholds due process and habeas corpus and assumes the innocence of the accused and allows for trial by jury.

And that's exactly the point. In order to be afforded those avenues of justice, bin Laden had to agree to the framework of the social compact. He didn't. The United States even went out of their way to offer him due process even though as a foreign national we didn't really need to bother. Bin Laden made the conscious decision to live out side the law -- and not just one particular law, but just about every law on the planet.

No, what Obama and Bush were talking about was rough justice or frontier justice.

The word “justice” should not adorn an assassination.

And now we come to the big finish. To say that bin Laden was "assassinated" is absurd and insulting. Assassins don't tell their targets they're coming. We've been doing that for 10 years now. What occurred last night was a manhunt, not an assassination. No one should even think about lamenting the loss of "assumption of innocence." It's the law that grants that right and since bin Laden refused to live within the law to the detriment of the well-being of many, he isn't afforded any such protections.