Rejoicing In Death

Yes, I was happy that bin Laden was killed. I’d fallen asleep before the networks broke in a week ago Sunday night, and woke up Monday morning May 2nd to read a headline crawl on Channel 3 that said bin Laden had died. A few seconds later, my wife popped her head out of the door to the bathroom in our master suite, and said “did you hear that bin Laden is dead?” I said I’d just read the headline, and assumed the bad kidney got him. A moment later, just after 5:30 AM, my friend Rob Starbuck delivered the stunning news. I got out of bed and told my wife about the SEAL team, just before she jumped into the shower, and she did a quick fist-pump.

Had I been writing headlines for radio or TV that morning, I would have said it the way the State Journal did that morning: bin Laden KILLED. I believe it is safe to assume that there was never a plan to capture him. No possible good and a great deal of bad would have come from his capture. I’ll go to my grave believing the SEAL team shot the sonofabitch in cold blood the minute they entered his bedroom. But, there’ll always be cover stories that will obscure the truth, which we’ll likely never know.

Then there were the predictably stoopid comments about how bin Laden was unarmed at the time; and the massive hand-wringing on social media about whether or not it’s OK to rejoice in someone else’s death, and the flurry of false quotations (the fake Martin Luther King quote about not rejoicing in someone else’s death is just one of the many that circulated), and the spate of fake photos that surfaced purporting to show the dead terrorist’s mangled face.

He’s gone and good riddance. I have no compunctions whatsoever about taking pleasure from the result of the meticulous planning and incredibly courageous action of our intelligence operatives and Special Forces. Job well done.

I do take issue with the scores of louts who made the most noise, pounding their chests, chanting “USA, USA, USA” as though we’d won a World Cup Match and acting like they had some connection to it. As Bill Maher said, these are the people who were in their underwear, drinking beer and eating Cheetos, watching Celebrity Apprentice when the news broke, and act like they had some personal connection to the mission.

I’m old enough to clearly remember what happened after Jimmy Carter’s failed mission to rescue the Iranian hostages. There was plenty of courage demonstrated by a lot of people back in 1980 during Operation Eagle Claw. It was the failure of that mission which gave birth to the Special Operations Command that made the mission to kill bin Laden a success.

And I am unabashedly happy they succeeded.