…article about how the President wasn’t going to release the Osama bin Laden death photos, and started muttering something to the effect of The decision is probably not going to be left up to the White House – and then I noted that Philip made the same observation at the end.
I have to agree with Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green: the political side of the bin Laden excision has been… poorly executed. Much worse than the military side, which I suspect was the aspect of the original mission that worried the White House most.
“Much worse than the military side, which I suspect was the aspect of the original mission that worried the White House most.” You could say that, or you could note that the military side was planned by professionals and the political side by, well…the White House.
1) The pictures are likely gruesome, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the corpse is not especially visually recognizable as OBL.
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2) A significant portion (maybe 100%) of the “pix or it didn’t happen” crowd will not be satisfied, no matter what is or is not released.
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3) There’s probably a big part of O’s base that’s not at all happy the way this went down (intel gained from interrogation @ Gitmo, followed by an elite assassination squad performing a successful op). Releasing graphic pictures of exactly what happened can only make that worse.
“Releasing graphic pictures of exactly what happened can only make that worse.”
Which is astounding. It’s a pre-literate mindset: “if I can’t see it, I can’t picture it, so it didn’t happen”.
This comment to Stephen Green’s post is simply delightful:
http://pajamasmedia.com/vodkapundit/comment/124578/
“His only job is and should be to ask if they’re confident in the plan, what are the possible negative outcomes, have they planned for everything to go wrong. His responsibility is to say yea or nay.”
. . . .
It was touch and go when SEIU demanded that the Seals take a mandatory break every two hours during the operation, but H. Clinton was able to convince BO to pay overtime for the lost breaks, which led to the union withdrawing that objection.
Finally, after three months, SEIU completed its Prevailing Wage survey – made more difficult, of course, by the relative lack of local highly trained and conditioned unionized covert assault teams for comparison purposes – and the go-ahead was given, pending receipt by SEIU of its agreed $13.2 million “permit” fee for the grant of union rule exemptions, and receipt by ACORN of a similar amount for “consultation” services.