No, killing of Bin Laden does not represent `continuity’ with Bush

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/no-killing-of-bin-laden-does-not-represent-continuity-with-bush/2011/03/04/AFJbo3YG_blog.html

No, killing of Bin Laden does not represent `continuity’ with Bush
By Adam Serwer

snip//

What is notable however, is that the major distinction between Obama and Bush that has formed the basis of GOP criticism of Obama — the President’s rejection of torture — has proven so decisively wrongheaded. Conservatives attempting to attribute successfully killing bin Laden to torture are merely attempting to take credit for what President Bush pointedly failed to do. Far from yielding the necessary intelligence, the two al Qaeda suspects who were waterboarded pointedly resisted identifying the courier whose activities lead to the U.S. discovering Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. The pro-torture argument ignores the obvious — that if torture was so effective, bin Laden would have been dead long ago. Bin Laden was found through years of painstaking intelligence gathering, not through the barbarous methods supported by many Bush apologists.

One cannot discount how shattering the Obama administration’s killing of Bin Laden has been to the self-image of conservatives who have convinced themselves of that the fight against al Qaeda hinges not just on torture, but on how many times the president says the word “terrorism,” or on Obama’s refusal to engage in juvenile expressions of American toughness.

While we’re far from the moment where terrorism ceases to be a threat, what torture apologists fear most now is a future in which al Qaeda is destroyed without the U.S. embracing the war-on-terror “dark side” that’s become central to their identity. Indeed, having rejected torture, Obama has nevertheless lead the country to its greatest victory in the fight against al Qaeda.

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. Also a discontinuity with Shrub policies in that Obama completes his goals, instead of going AWOL

on everything he sets out to do.

Shrub: "I promise to begin a whole range of haphazard and basically random missions and goals, and will approach each one of them with the same half-assedness that I approached my life, my military service, and my businesses with, until I get bored with them and just go AWOL entirely on the entire whatever-it-was I was just talking about, I don't remember. Watch this drive!"

[damntexdem]

2. How could it:

1) Dubya didn't get him; and
2) Dubya didn't want to get him -- Dubya needed him to scare Americans.

[Hutzpa]

4. Didin't you know he put on a jump suit and flew into

Pakistan and killed Bin Laden by himself? where were you?

:sarcasm:

[opihimoimoi]

3. The GOPers are indeed besides themselves with envy and loss of Face

[jenmito]

5. Every Repub. from the Bush admin. was on Sunday's morning news shows, spouting the

lie that waterboarding directly led to the killing of bin Laden, and that Obama deserves credit for "continuing Bush's policies." I wish they would've been challenged on their lies, and shown video of Bush saying he really didn't think about bin Laden any more and other similar things. But they weren't. :eyes:

[JuniperLea]

6. OBL would have needed to be tipped off and had gotten away...

In order for this to be anything similar to a BushCo operation.