So here, for examination, is my head.
Declaring that any murder – including those brought about by the death penalty – is a manifestation of justice is a task best left to God, or to those decisive enough to be one of his or her delegates. In other words, not me. Osama bin Laden, our president declared, deserved to be killed because he was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on American soil. I cannot say one way or the other if I agree with that because I have too many questions, beginning – and ending – with this: If that’s the measure of justice, how broadly, or narrowly, is it applied?
So leaving behind the question of whether or not I agree with the president, I’m assuming that my refusal to take his word on the justice issue means that I need to get in line for an examination.
I thought the president’s performance on Sixty Minutes was deplorable. I thought it was cynical, I thought it reached down and stroked the lowest chords of blind nationalism and I thought it was embarrassing.
One of the most troubling parts of watching our president transition from “nuanced” to “decisive” is that the theme of the entire performance (and by performance I do not mean Sixty Minutes but the presidency itself) comes across as painfully macho. I wish I would have counted the number of times the president used the word “guys.” Those guys and these guys and our guys and on and on it went. Most importantly, the president said not with words but with a truly sickening sneer on his face and in his voice and his churlish laughter, was that our guys, who really are awesome, as they were banging around in the dark and kicking down walls managed to “retrieve” a lot of very valuable paperwork. Had John Wayne been tuned in on Sunday evening he would have had to change his undies. The president was that good.
In case anyone missed the male angle, the show included clips of the president actually speaking directly to the guys, lots of them, at military bases. “Job well done!” he bellowed, swerving a bit into that good old Negro dialect. And then, again, “Job! Well! Done!”
Running a close second on the offensiveness scorecard was the reference to Geronimo. The president, being decisive and all, let that one out as if it were a silky, odorless fart: It didn’t stink and he didn’t flinch. Was that his way of currying favor with those who dismissed the reaction to referring to Osama bin Laden with the code name Geronimo as “political correctness”? Hell if I know. What I do know is that a black male born and raised in the United States who thinks it’s okay to legalize discrimination against gay people has no bottom line, so exploiting a fairly easy target for the sake of political gain is to be expected, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden? Did neither of them object to the code name or are both of them also … decisive?
Then, as a way of acknowledging the importance of Mother’s Day I suppose, the president said that not letting the officials in Pahki-stahn know about the mission wasn’t a particularly difficult decision. That’s because he didn’t even tell his family. So, if we are to take the president at his word, a major factor of some pretty significant diplomacy issues and tactics and strategies is whether or not the president’s wife and his daughters have been apprised of the action plan? I wonder how people in Pahki-stahn – a U.S. ally, from what I hear – feel about that. Not good, would be my guess.
In spite of his new decisiveness, the president did, as always, provide a bit of ammo for the Republicans. The delivery of justice to Osama bin Laden, the president said, was a project that began last August. So, to “get” one guy took nine months? (For the sake of comparison it took only 14 months – assuming he began the project on his very first day in office – to get what he called healthcare reform through the U.S. House of Representatives.) Those nine months must have been riddled by lots of nuance, lots of cerebral elitism put forth by the guy formerly known as the professor in chief. I can just hear a Republican hopeful or two declaring that not only does the nine months it took to complete the mission not speak well for government efficiency or national security, it’s hardly decisive.
