Moe Lane

Via Drudge comes the beginnings of clarity on this issue: it’s now being tacitly admitted by the Pakistan government that Saturday’s conflict was initiated by their own troops.  Essentially, Afghan/American troops were raiding Taliban in Afghanistan when Pakistan troops fired on them (the Pakistan government maintains that their troops were attacking on what they thought were insurgents).  NATO airstrikes were the result, which shot up two military posts and killed over twenty Pakistani troops.

The Pakistanis’ claim here is that they alerted NATO forces that it was their military posts that were being shot up (although they apparently informed NATO earlier that they had no troops in the area); one Afghan response to that was that the insurgents that NATO/Afghan troops were hunting had retreated to said posts and continued to shoot from there.  Which, if true, more or less illustrates the reason why you do not offer tactical shelter to people who are shooting at United States troops.  The end result will be the local real estate getting reconfigured into a state best described as ‘lunar landscape.’ (more…)

This is the tenth year anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities; and it is also the first year that I cannot in fact engage in my usual habit of taunting the author of said atrocities by reminding him that he failed, because I am alive and free, and he is in hiding.  That is because Osama bin Laden is now dead and almost certainly in Hell*, and there is frankly nothing that I can do or say any longer that would make the slightest bit of difference with regard to his fate.  So – being reminded by a friend online – I have instead prayed for the souls of all those who were lost in that atrocities that day, and for all of those who have been lost since then keeping the rest of us safe from further atrocities, and for those people’s loved ones.

I think that this is a good thing to do.

Moe Lane

*There is always the chance of repentance.  God’s mercy is infinite; you just have to truly want to throw yourself on it.

The first uses an event involving the second to illustrate a point about the third.

Less cryptically: Andrew points out that Rudolf Hess’s body was evicted from its grave after the lease ran out*, cremated, and the ashes scattered at sea – largely because Hess’s grave had become a magnet for neo-Nazis, and nobody wants those guys around.  Which is largely why we threw Osama bin Laden’s rapidly cooling corpse into the Indian Ocean**; let jihadi-wannabes try to cover that in flowers.

No, actually, knowing human beings they probably won’t pick one spot and commemorate the SOB there.  They’ll probably pick three or four, then fight with each other which is the ‘best’ one (hopefully, with live ammo).

Moe Lane

*Apparently you can lease grave space in Europe.  Hell, for all I know that’s the worldwide industry standard.

**Not to mention the Soviets’ Russians’ notoriously tight-lipped non-response to any and all polite inquiries on what happened to Hitler’s body.  I struck out ‘Soviets’ because while I no longer cut Commies any slack, I can’t say that I blame the Russians on this one…

Rep. Schakowsky, attempting to explain why photos of the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden would not be released, had this to say:

“These are pictures of a violent crime scene. This is a dead person. A dead Osama bin Laden,” she said.

Now, I will readily grant that normally a statement like this should be subject to Occam’s Razor.  The simplest way to explain the problems with the first sentence* would be to simply postulate that the person who uttered it is a semi-literate buffoon who is so unthinkingly programmed to parrot outworn and exploded progressive agitprop that she is truly unaware that even suggesting that Navy SEALs are criminals for killing Osama bin Laden is offensive.  Or that she has not contemplated that her aforementioned parroting handily confirms every not-nice said about the average progressive antiwar politician’s judgement, character, and native mother-wit.  Or that (by extension) Schakowsky is accusing fellow-Democrat President Barack Obama of war crimes, given that he gave the order.  Yes, really, if this had just been uttered by some nobody then you could simply chalk the comment up to pig-ignorance, coupled with thee utterer being a natural-born damned fool. (more…)

Huh.  Maybe Osama was shot in the back of the head.

“The bullet either went in the ear and out the eyeball or in the eyeball and out the ear,” [Senator Jim Inhofe] said.

I speculated earlier that a scenario consistent with the former bullet trajectory may have sparked the decision by the White House to keep the pictures under wraps: this suggests that I may have been right.

Moe Lane

PS: I continue to have an utter lack of outrage over the possibility, by the way.

Via Hot Air:

Hell, switch ‘em out with half the punditocracy in this country and we’d come out ahead.  I mean, you expect some of this stuff from an eight year old; it’s only when it comes out of the mouth of a thirty-something Ivy League journo-drone that you start wincing.

In lighter news, the German media has discovered the super-secret insignia of the team that took down Osama bin Laden!

…or perhaps not.

Via RedState reader donnybrooke, who managed to render me momentarily speechless with this one. Kai donnybrooke.

Legal Insurrection tipped me to this one: apparently, ThinkProgress (link available via Legal Insurrection) got itself in a bit of a tizzy over a story in the Mexican press that one of the Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden was the son of Mexican immigrants, which apparently means (according to TP) that we need to pass the DREAM Act* and that the military is by the way keeping Latinos down.  Now, let’s establish something right off of the bat; I don’t know who was on that SEAL team, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to hear that one or more of them were of Latino ancestry.  Or any other ancestry, frankly.  That’s not the point: the point is that when you’re a hardcore partisan ideologue using a story for agitprop, you should probably check the story first to make sure that you don’t get burned.

ThinkProgress did not check the story first.

Quick: read this sentence (from the original Mexican newspaper article that sent TP into a tizzy) and tell me what’s wrong with it.  It’s OK if you don’t speak Spanish: neither do I, really – and I still can pick out the howler, so you should be able to, too.

El soldado Rubén Mejía, nacido en este país y de padres guanajuatenses, ha sido ascendido a sargento por el operativo en que un equipo enfrentó y dio muerte a Bin Laden.

“Sargento.”

(more…)

Pajamas Media took a survey of various European media sources and their evolving reaction to the Osama bin Laden excision.  It will not surprise anyone in the slightest to hear that the level of disapproval has been increasing all week, with many an envious sneer along the way.  The German response is particularly telling  (they’re usually a leading indicator of Left-wing antiwar thinking*): even the center-right (hah!) magazines want international tribunals and investigations and whatnot.  So we should probably see the first calls for that over here in about… a week or so.  Probably followed with the leaking of the SEAL team’s names by some fellow-traveler in the Executive Branch with a grudge against the military and an iPad, so I hope that the SEALs are taking my advice and getting a lawyer now.

I’m also going to give some free advice to the White House: and I actually hope that they’ll take it, because this is an American issue, not a Right/Left, Republican/Democrat, or Competent/Incompetent one.  Let’s just say that I don’t really care what’s on the tapes that we’re suddenly now saying that we don’t actually have.  This is because I’m reasonably sure that there’s nothing drastically awful on them, given that they weren’t suppressed from the get-go: so there’s nothing like an actual noncombatant being molested or shot out of hand or anything like that.  If there is something like that on them then I would have to wonder why the administration didn’t react with horror at the time, but never mind that right now: the point is, I expect that the video record doesn’t show an actual atrocity. (more…)

And I cannot BELIEVE that this is even remotely necessary advice:

Now that you’re back?

Get a lawyer.

Because I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this, that’s why.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, of course I’d love to be wrong about this.

…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.

…over what the whole thing means.  Read it.  Personally, I’m just going to put up two things about Osama bin Laden, and then hopefully go back to my life:

First: This is going around the VRWC, mostly because we don’t care who you are, it’s as funny as hell:

…Yeah.  Nothing personal, Donald, but that was what the folks in the carny trade call a ‘blow-off.’  I don’t think that you’re going to be able to trump that one.

(more…)