It's been 24 hours, and bin Laden is still dead

And I'm still happy about it. How about y'all?

Also still dead:

 

One of the few presidential addresses I looked forward to viewing.

 

Really, I've been listening to a bunch of talk radio callers who apparently have better sources than Obama does.

 

Abe Vigoda and yadda yadda yadda.

 

I don't get it. This board is chock full of people who are against the death penalty. Can't play god, yadda yadda yadda. Yet this guy gets wiped out, and not a peep. Seems hypocritical to me. Is it the number? If you kill three thousand, you deserve to die, but if you kill one or two, you don't? What am I missing?

 

Because everything is going to magically revert back to how it was on September 10, 2001. Why be a spoilsport?

Seriously, I'll be the token strawman liberal and say I'm against this extrajudicial killing. It demeans America and everything we're supposed to stand for. Still... what the heck... we passed the moral point of no return a long time ago. Why spill tears now? And for what it's worth, this killing might be the cover to start pulling out of the AfPak.

 

"Not a peep"?

Au contraire.

You are missing the sequence in the initial Bin Laden thread where this very topic was discussed somewhat in-depth. I think it's around page 40-41 or so.

The Cliff Notes version is that I said, as a staunch anti-capital punishment person, that I'm OK with how this went down because they expected and received resistance, and had to return fire. The idea I got from the coverage was that, had he surrendered, the SEALs would have taken him alive. Others were skeptical about that (and so am I, but that's what was said).

From a tactical standpoint, I am very pleased that our intelligence and military finally got their man. As a human, I sadly realize that nothing brings back 3,000 people, two towers, and our sense of security, including his death. That's the same hollow feeling I fight whenever "justice" is done, whether it is by lethal injection or life in prison. I never feel satiated.

Today, I've been thinking about how the bogeyman of our era, once confronted face-to-face instead of sending impressionable young men on suicide missions, was killed in his mansion by a firefight in which not one of our men was killed. Fraud is the word that comes to mind.

 

Ball's been teed up, everyone ...

 

I liked Kimmel's joke. "Buried at sea actually means dumped in the ocean."

 

Except now they are saying OBL may not have had a gun, muchless fired.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54162.html


For what it's worth I think your stance here is completely hypocritical (said the guy who is a HUGE supporter of the death penalty).

 

I don't care if they shot him in the back as he ran away. I don't care if they executed him as his family watched.

 

This wasn't an execution, this wasn't an assassination and it certainly wasn't murder.

Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States of America, as such he was a legitimate military target. That compound was essentially a theater of war.