After hearing the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed, who among us didn’t joyfully shout, “Yes! This is a huge triumph for wind and solar energy!” Or “Wahoo! Now we can get immigration reform passed!” Personally, I would like to thank every member of SEAL Team 6 for taking such huge risks for high-speed rail and streamlining the bureaucratic regulations governing salmon fishing.
If you’re confused, it’s only because you haven’t heard the White House explain the true significance of bin Laden’s death.
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According to an article in the Washington Post headlined “Bin Laden raid fits into Obama’s ‘big things’ message,” the White House believes taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist is a boon for the entire Obama agenda.
The president says killing bin Laden proves that “as a nation there is nothing that we can’t do” and reminds us “that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”
When asked what effect bin Laden’s assassination will have on Obama’s agenda, White House press secretary Jay Carney explained, “We obviously think that if there is a takeaway from it, it is the resolve that he has, the focus he brings to bear on long-term objectives, that he keeps pushing to get them done. When talking about immigration reform, he keeps pushing to get it done. And I think that that was reflected in his approach to dealing with Osama bin Laden.”
Meanwhile, David Axelrod, Obama’s former White House consigliere, now running the reelection effort, says that this was all a “reaffirmation of that American determination and American spirit — the ability to do the things that some people thought impossible. And that has value.”
Quick question: Did anyone, anywhere, think that killing bin Laden was an “impossible” task?
Killing bin Laden was no small thing, and the heroics of the men (and dog) involved warrant unwavering praise. But it wasn’t the moon landing.
But that’s not what the White House wants you to believe. Indeed, for the last two years, the president has been beginning sentences, “If we can put a man on the moon . . . ” to justify whatever he’s talking about.
That is why Axelrod says, “If there’s an enduring impact of [bin Laden’s assassination], it will be a sense of what the president said in his State of the Union address.”
Which brings us back to salmon regulations, immigration, high-speed rail, renewable energy, and other action items on Obama’s “win the future” agenda laid out in January’s address. Back then, Obama said we were in a “Sputnik moment,” referring to the time when the Soviet Union’s launch of a satellite inspired the Apollo space program and increased spending on scientific education and research.
So if I understand Axelrod correctly, killing bin Laden proves that “Yes We Can!” We can get all that “Sputnik moment” stuff done.
If all of this weren’t so hilarious, it would be infuriating. Can you imagine if President Bush had said that the success of the surge in Iraq proved we really needed to privatize Social Security after all? What if John McCain had won in 2008 and ordered the killing of bin Laden? Would Senator Obama have rallied around his former opponent’s agenda?
By all means, Obama deserves his fair share of credit for taking out bin Laden, though calling it one of the “most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory,” as Obama adviser John Brennan did, strains credulity almost as much as it rakes the ears of grammarians.
But the most bestest part, as Brennan might say, is the simple fact that the president doesn’t know how we’ll “win the future.” In his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill, Obama explained that we don’t know how we’ll get where we need to go or what the destination will even look like.
But that’s the genius of the Sputnik analogy. Since, as Obama explained, “we had no idea how we would beat (the Soviets) to the moon,” it’s okay that we don’t know how to “win the future.” And that in turn means that during the weakest recovery in half a century, we can blow billions on mythical green-energy jobs, push a government takeover of health care, encourage skyrocketing gas prices, impose crippling regulations and higher taxes, and make “investments” in white elephants and high-speed salmon.
Oh, it may not seem as if we’re making progress on these fronts, but we are. You know how you can tell? Osama bin Laden is dead.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.
Except make travel by rail profitable enough to support itself by ticket sales alone.
Secure our boarders.
Make government-mandated sub-prime lending sound economic policy.
Make wind and solar cheaper and more productive than burning the remains of dinosaurs.
Win a war against poverty.
Offer electric cars like the Volt that people want to buy without having to subsidize to bring the cost down.
When America fails, it is usually because we think good intentions and a pile of cash can overcome 20,000-year-old established human behavior. Comparatively speaking, beating the Nazis or landing on the moon are simple things we easily get right.
"Meanwhile, David Axelrod, Obama’s former White House consigliere, now running the reelection effort, says that this was all a “reaffirmation of that American determination and American spirit — the ability to do the things that some people thought impossible. And that has value.” "
So, murdering an unarmed terrorist reaffirms all that is American? Man, if Bush would have said that every "values" group from the USCCB, to the United Methodist Church would have been in deep frothing rage.
Perhaps, we shall see more of these high profile spec ops raids during the remainder of the election cycle. They will become a weekly event, after which the President can hold a rally.
Bin Laden was not murdered and he was not assassinated. He was a combatant in war (a war HE started, by the way) and he was killed as such. In that he was no different from the tens of millions of combatants that have been killed in human history.
We really need to get this terminology straight before such nonsense gets even deeper into the conventional wisdom.
Perhaps the dumbest and most exploitative phrase in modern political discourse.
There was nothing scientifically difficult in the moon program. The basic science of space flight was well understood decades before Apollo. What it was was a series of difficult but solvable engineering problems. It took a lot of time, patience, perseverance, dedication and money to solve them, and we are right to be proud of that effort, but that accomplishment doesn't mean that the laws of physics and nature no longer apply.
There is no "green energy", at least on the scale needed to power a modern, industrial economy (except for nuclear, of course). Windmills, solar, algae, swtich grass...its all a bad joke. But the worse joke is the idea that an Apollo-style effort (ie, a concentrated engineering program) can overcome the limitations of the basic science of those technologies. It can't. The basic scientific discoveries that could allow for carbon-neutral, non-nuclear energy on the required scale have not occurred.
And they may never occur. The core life and energy cycles of the planet upon which the vast majority of our energy is based are carbon based. Carbon is everything. Our energy is built on us redirecting and exploiting the carbon processes that occur naturally. There simply are no other such systems out there for us to tap into.
Until our physicists come up with some entirely new theories, we are stuck with what we have. No amount of spending, no amount of wishing it were otherwise, can change that.
“Quick question: Did anyone, anywhere, think that killing bin Laden was an “impossible” task?”
Killing OBL would have been impossible if Obama and the Left had successfully stopped Enhanced Interrogations, domestic wiretapping of communications with foreign terrorists, rendition, targeted assassination of terrorists. If someone believed that Obama would actually have done what he said and stopped these policies, then that person probably did think that killing OBL was an impossible task for President Obama to carry out. I admit that I might be giving the left the benefit of thinking logically about their policy positions and their reaction to OBL’s killing.
Again another pithy retort from a long dead Beatle that adds nothing to the conversation. Bill Whittle addresses many of your favorite memes in this edition of memebuster
I am just glad Jonah gave the dog some credit too. Reading this column was like watching a really good show, you keep getting more and more into it, and then all the sudden -- its' done. I enjoyed it.
I was willing to give a bit of credit to Obama for his decision (all 16 agonizing hours of it) to take out OBL - simply because making such a decision really must have stressed out all of his progressive instincts. However, the more he talks afterward, the more he uses up that bit of --um-- lesser disregard that he had earned - from crocs on the border, to ignoring TX wildfires, to this misappropriation of triumph...
True, the linked poll only says that 67% (67%!) believed as of last September that it was "unlikely" that Bin Laden would ever be captured or killed. But surely a decent portion of that huge group believed that he would elude us until his natural death, no matter what we did.
Of course there were many people in that huge group of 67% who didn't believe that we could do this. Beyond that, of course, there had been naysaying on this issue for almost 10 years, for example Donald Rumsfeld in Oct. 2001 saying that we might "never" get Bin Laden:
But we did. And Obama will rightly reap the benefits of being seen as competent for putting that operation in place, even though people like Rumsfeld were concerned that we couldn't do it and people like Bush said that he wasn't too "concerned" about whether we did it.
Try all you like to diminish this accomplishment, Mr. Goldberg, but the facts are the facts.
It’s certainly an accomplishment, one that owes more to Bush’s War on Terror policies, our intelligence services and our AMAZING Navy Seals than anything Obama did. Obama’s *ahem* “gutsy call” is really lowering the bar because we should expect that any president who had the intelligence locating OBL would have mounted an operation to take him out, or capture him. We should give Obama the credit for having the good sense to embrace the War on Terror policies he spent years critiquing, but it’s somewhat ludicrous to laud praise on Obama for ordering the raid on OBL because it’s the least we should expect from any President.
Osama can't prop up Obama! The shine off this will fade fast for the very reasons you mentioned, joblessness, gas prices, food prices and the overall feeling that the future is a soup kitchen! If there isn't a significant change by Nov. 2012 anybody should be able to defeat him, even a second rate b-movie actor!
@Omaha- excellent points. When will the science be brought out clearly to the public, so they can see the problems with such ideologically driven projects, which are by the science and the economics, doomed to fail.
The Seals and operatives that made the mission to take out OBL possible are highly commended and deserve many accolades.
Even so- its much easier to kill something that's gone bad (OBL), than to create something complex that works well (Transportation and energy systems, that aid the economy and fortunes of Americans).
That's just basic thermodynamics!
Mr. President made a good decision, with the help of those around him, with regards to the mission targetign OBL. That does not translate to the ability to create something ex nihilo.
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