Sorry You Can't Handle That We Won

So, I've been away from blogging again for a while, what did I miss? Nothing important going on, right?

It's been so interesting as a media scholar to follow how things have played out in the week since President Obama announced to the world that our troops killed Osama Bin Laden and tossed his wretched corpse in the ocean. There seems to be three main storylines that have emerged: 1) the attack itself, and the new details we keep learning about it, 2) the huge role social media played in everyone finding out what happened on Sunday night, and 3) the backlash. Yes, because in this country, we cannot have anything truly positive happen without someone (or a cluster of like-minded someones) ripping it to pieces, we have a backlash against the death of the world's #1 terrorist... a backlash in our own country, no less.

But back to Sunday night, and I guess I'm going with storyline #2 before I get to the other stuff. I was in the midst of a hellish week and a half-long stretch of working furiously to get my final papers and projects finished. I just happened to take a break around 10:45pm and decided to see what was happening on Twitter... and that's how I (like many others) found out that the president was going to speak to the nation to declare that Bin Laden was dead. Erroneous facts about drones doing the job went out, but soon we found out the truth... and people immediately were joyous, cathartic... and pretty damn funny. I have to tell you the lines people came up with on Facebook and Twitter in the first 24 hours after the news broke were laugh-out-loud funny... or maybe I should say LOL funny. People enjoyed the fact that after Obama released his birth certificate and dropped both Donald Trump and the birthers in their tracks, after Obama skewered Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner the night before... the president decides to make break into network programming to make his big announcement... in the middle of "Celebrity Apprentice." Well played, Mr. President.

So we got a lot of jokes about Trump demanding to see death certificates, Obama telling Bin Laden, "You're fired", and many other terrific lines that fit within 140 characters or less. My personal favorite was: "Bin Laden's final tweet: 'Hold on, there's somebody at the door...'" And then Jon Stewart, who is truly made for moments like this, went on "The Daily Show" Monday night and declared that Osama Bin Laden now "lives in a pineapple under the sea"... followed by an animated map that turned Florida into America's rejuvenated manhood, if you know what I mean. It really was something impressive to see that social media worked for news dissemination in a manner that its creators and proponents always dreamed it would... and not just to live-tweet the royal wedding...

However, at the same time, there was this undercurrent building up from the usual suspects... people who could not be happy with America getting a win at a time when this nation needed a win. People who found the cheering crowds in front of the White House and at the Phillies-Mets game on ESPN to be tasteless and offensive. People who found the cathartic response of America as a whole to be tasteless and offensive, and let's face it, they probably found the fact that we killed Osama Bin Laden tasteless and offensive. After all, these were likely the same people who on September 12 were saying that we should "understand why they hate us"... in other words, instead of bringing al-Qaeda to justice, we should have tried to figure out what we did to make them want to attack us... and then presumably changed our wicked ways. It seemed like the only people in the days immediately following the big announcement who were upset that we had killed the world's #1 terrorist were Hamas, the Pakistani Taliban, Venezuela (hmmm... kinda makes you wonder...), and American peaceniks.

In the days since, we've found out a lot more about the attack, that it was the Navy Seals elite team that pulled off the attack on Bin Laden's swanky (for Pakistan) compound in the suburbs, where he was hiding right under the collective noses of the Pakistani military. And I can understand why Pakistan is so pissed off at us for conducting this operation on their soil... after all, when you screw up something others were counting on you to do (ya know, FINDING THE GUY), the usual defensive reaction is to blame others, and angrily so. Then there was the debate about whether or not to release the photos. I side with the president on this one: when you score, don't spike the football, and if I may carry the football metaphor further, don't give the other team "bulletin board material" they can use to motivate themselves to come back at you. I honestly think the administration handled this very well. In fact, with everything that happened recently, Obama may soon get his own episode of "Best Week Ever" on VH-1.

However, in the days since, we also started to see a lot of nit-picking start, and again from the usual suspects. First it was all about whether or not Bin Laden was unarmed when our troops shot and killed him. Then it was about making sure President Bush got absolutely NONE of the credit for this because the legacy of his policies as destroying the country would be harmed in some way if people actually credited the Patriot Act and other aspects of the War on Terror with the desired end result, as executed by President Obama and our elite troops. Then, Michael Moore slammed the president for the operation, saying it was an "execution". Okay, sounds good to me, Michael. I don't care what you call it, the bastard's dead. And the 9-11 Truthers popped up, telling us that none of the evidence found in the compound links Bin Laden to the 9-11 attacks in any way, and since the photos were not released, did we REALLY kill him? I mean Obama's been criticized so much and in so many different ways for this successful military operation, you'd think BUSH was still president.

I'm sorry, but we accomplished Objective #1 in the War on Terror: Get Bin Laden. For anyone to think that it was not worth the effort or should not have been done as it was (or not at all) is to not understand justice. Justice is that those who do wrong shall be punished. Justice was served. And like it or not (and as you well know if you read this blog on a regular basis, I'm not exactly the president's #1 fan), President Obama just went a long way toward ensuring re-election next year.

The one real question that remains is that of whether or not we should stay in Afghanistan now that Objective #1 has been accomplished. I've said in the past that I kinda feel like we've done all we can for Afghanistan, and if the Karzai regime is too corrupt to stand on its own, then they have nobody to blame but themselves. We haven't let the people down, we've done everything we could. If the president can find an exit strategy that drives this particular point home, then perhaps it's time. We're almost fully out of Iraq (and will be by year's end), might be a good time to close the book on all of this, while still remaining vigilant and ready to respond to any kind of reprisal attacks. The world will never go back to the way it was on September 10, 2001, and I don't think that's what we're ultimately looking for. We just want the safest, best America possible, and the safest, best world possible, and those two goals are not mutually exclusive.

But when you do score, don't spike the football... and don't go calling for "excessive celebration" because the player saluted in the end zone. Yes, I just made a Pinstripe Bowl reference...