By Bob Cesca: You might have noticed how the Democrats last week weren’t afraid to ballyhoo the Obama administration’s tenacious pursuit and killing of Osama Bin Laden. This pivotal event in the president’s first term represented what could be the beginning of a major shift in the perception of the Democrats as an inept, wimpy faction that tends to mishandle foreign policy and national security endeavors.

In spite of the Bush administration’s ineptitude on this front, there continues to be a massive “strong on national security” polling gap in favor of the Republicans. Back in 2010, a year before Bin Laden was killed, the Republicans were crushing the Democrats on this front by a margin of 27 points, 59 percent to 33 percent. Even with the killing of Bin Laden and the ending of the Iraq war, the Democrats lag behind the Republicans by a full 10 points, according to Rasmussen (admittedly, a Republican-leaning polling outfit, but you get the idea).

So there’s still a lot of work to be done on this issue even though, by all empirical accounts and given the Obama record versus the dismal Bush record, the Democrats should be crushing it on the national security polling front. The difference is obviously not the actions and policies of the respective administrations, but specifically in how they talk about national security and foreign policy successes. If it was just successes minus a political PR effort, the Obama Democratic Party would be out-polling the Republicans but, as of right now, it’s just the president who’s leading Mitt Romney by around 9 points on this issue. Not enough, obviously, to change the broader party perception held by voters that still shows Republicans as stronger on nation security and foreign policy. I suppose eight years of “bring ‘em on” hubris, jingoism and lies from the Bush/Cheney’s PR apparatus regarding the false notion of “keeping us safe” has stuck with voters.

The only way to overcome such a gap is for the Democratic Party — not just the Obama administration — to boast its national security posture. Hence all of the Bin Laden death talk last week. And when it comes to rank-and-file voters, you’re not going to find much sympathy for the deadliest terrorist in modern history.

Over the weekend, noted foreign policy reporter Jeremy Scahill appeared on “Up with Chris Hayes” and slammed the use of Bin Laden’s death “as a football to spike on the national stage.” Scahill and others on the left who tend to focus on the president’s national security and civil liberties record above all else have criticized the targeted killing of Bin Laden and especially the use of the mission for political purposes. I hasten to note that, yes, Scahill, Greenwald et al have an important role to play as the idealist, pacifist conscience of the far-left. They say Bin Laden should’ve been captured alive and granted due process in the courts, either in American courts or in a Nuremberg-style international tribunal. But this carries with it significant dangers, both political and practical that I’m not sure they entirely grasp.

The biggest mistake many Scahill types make is to somehow divorce politics from policy when, in reality, there’s a considerable Venn diagram overlap between the two. If, in some sort of fantasy scenario, you were to remove politics and public opinion from policy, leaders could make significantly more idealized decisions about such matters. But we have a system whereby the only means to accomplish certain goals is to compromise or outright sacrifice others. In this case, however, it’s probably a bit of a no-brainer. Kill Bin Laden, the most hated criminal in the world, potentially win re-election and therefore have an opportunity to further lock down a left-of-center agenda? Yes, please. This approach further calculates that the “due process for Bin Laden” crowd is miniscule and probably won’t find too much sympathy to make an electoral difference especially when compared to the colossal upsides that come with a “take him out” order.

Admittedly, this is a complex issue — the intentional killing of terrorist leader, but the upside could very well mean securing healthcare for 30 million Americans, preventing a 66 percent cut in Medicaid funds to mostly children and disabled Americans, the protection of reproductive rights, preventing a significant rightward ideological shift on the Supreme Court for possibly another generation and the further establishment of equal rights for LGBT Americans as well as undocumented workers. The list goes on and on. Yes, a life is a life. But the life of a known and admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks (as well as countless others) simply doesn’t compare with the potential for what a second Obama term as president could mean for millions upon millions of Americans. (During the healthcare debate, Harvard released a statistic regarding deaths due to a lack of health insurance. The number amounted to around 3,000 per month. That’s a new 9/11 every month.) And the only way to get there is to ballyhoo the accomplishment — a concept, by the way, that the Obama administration has been heretofore slow to embrace.

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t struggled with this point of view. How would I have felt if the Bush administration had killed Bin Laden? Would I be as supportive of the decision? Would I have pushed for due/judicial process? Regardless of who gave the order, I, like many Americans, probably would’ve reacted similarly. I would’ve greeted news of the death of Bin Laden with relief, just as I did when it was announced by a president I support. Relief is a realistic and human reaction, irrespective of who gave the order. But I also would’ve been critical of the Bush administration’s inevitable use of scare-tactics, which they surely would’ve incorporated into the announcement. It’s very likely they would’ve fabricated some new Toe Monster to frighten us into continued submission. I would’ve also been critical of the new powers they would’ve tried to attain given the post-announcement wave of support. It’s worth noting that there would’ve been a significantly higher bounce in approval numbers for Bush than there was for President Obama. Whenever the Bush team enjoyed some sort of polling bounce, they exploited the political capital with an egregious, over-the-top agenda that included the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, warrantless wiretaps and the attempted privatization of Social Security.

Ultimately, whatever case Scahill might make, there’s simply no real precedent when it comes to someone like Osama Bin Laden. Has an American commander-in-chief ever confronted a scenario in which a rogue terrorist financier and mastermind orchestrated the killing of thousands of people in a trio of deadly, coordinated strikes on American soil, then repeatedly admitted to committing crimes on videotape? And has that commander-in-chief had to make a choice as to whether to kill the admitted terrorist or to arrest and detain him with a variety of potentially dicey legal avenues to pursue — any one of them leading to the possible release of the terrorist while the commander-in-chief is still in power? Not that I’m aware of.

So it’s very easy to take the pacifistic high road in a vacuum and without acknowledging the political realities involved. Scahill and like-minded critics of the president have the luxury of taking the high road, but without a nod to the political ramifications, it become merely idealistic (if not entirely contrarian) single pet-issue finger-wagging. Mitt Romney wants to not only amplify a reckless imperialistic posture on the world stage, but he also wants to roll back everything the president has accomplished on the domestic and economic front. Ordering the death of Bin Laden and sufficiently boasting its success goes a long way towards preventing Romney/Ryan from accomplishing their nefarious goals. I simply can’t find fault in the Democratic approach — morally or politically. I can’t justify the forgoing of this political “football spike” when inaction and silence means a greater chance for the Republicans to re-establish deadly limits on health insurance for struggling Americans or reversing the economic recovery with larger slash-and-burn cuts in government spending. It must be quite a luxury to take such a narrow view of presidential decision-making. In this context and with these consequences, it’s simply not possible or practical.

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By Ben Cohen: Yesterday, I blogged about Salon.com’s featured writer Glenn Greenwald and called him out for an incredibly smug post about Raw Story. The post kicked off a bit of a twitter storm with quite a few people re-tweeting the article. It seems I hit a bit of a nerve, no doubt because Greenwald isn’t particularly popular in many Left wing circles. I’d like to expand a little on the point of my post – not to continue bashing Greenwald, but to explain a wider point that I think is highly relevant when it comes to having political discourse.

I want to repeat that I do have a lot of respect for Greenwald and rate him highly as a writer. He does important work and should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in understanding the facts about US government policy. Generally speaking, I think Greenwald is usually correct in his analysis of current affairs – his work is thorough and well substantiated and it’s often hard to find disagreement with his logic.

However, there is a common theme when reading writers like Greenwald – it is that they have come to believe so strongly in their own perception of reality that there is no longer room for debate. Greenwald enters every discussion knowing that he is right, and everyone else either doesn’t get it, or is flat out wrong.

While Greenwald’s voice is important, he becomes completely pointless after while because people start to tune out. While Greenwald would argue that it doesn’t stop him from being right (after all, facts are facts) it does mean that his work no longer has any tangible impact. Chez Pazienza has spent quite a bit of time rebutting Greenwald for his militancy, and I think he makes the point most astutely:

When I shrug off the often shrill and selfish criticism of Greenwald — and it is selfish in the sense that, like it or not, it risks the greater good in the pursuit of perfection that he seems to demand on his personal pet issues — it’s because I don’t feel that there’s any real sense of conscience behind it. I’ve actually come around on the idea that Greenwald isn’t simply interested in getting people to pay attention to him — although I do believe he enjoys being able to think of himself a thorn in the side of the world — and I now accept that he genuinely seeks to adhere to a very strict laundry list of political issues because he considers those issues important above all. The problem is, and always has been, that he’ll sacrifice everything else — burn down the whole village if he has to — just to get his way on them.

The mainstream Left in America is an imperfect union of divided interests, corruption and some good intention. The Democratic Party has been subverted by corporate interests, and the liberal media is a reflection of that. By virtue of his job, President Obama is the figurehead of all of this, and presides over the future direction of the country. Glenn Greenwald devotes post after post, day after day, week after week attacking Obama, the Democrats and the liberal media for their misdeeds, never skipping a beat or missing an opportunity to rake the Left over the coals. Which is fine – a journalists job should be to hold power to account, and the media in America generally fails to do that. For that, Greenwald can give himself a pat on the back.

But the world is a complicated place, and changing it for the better is an extremely messy process. I know many people in the mainstream media and in government, all of whom I’d classify as decent people trying to make a change. The understand the system they are a part of, and largely do their jobs to the best of their ability given the constraints they are under. For people like Greenwald, this is never good enough – if people don’t adhere to his own strict guidelines, they can be dismissed as irrelevant. Greenwald scathing attack and arrogant dismissal of Raw Story is a classic example of this, and underlines his inability to see his own faults.  The problem is, if everyone took Greenwald’s attitude, nothing would ever change. Yes, President Obama has failed to live up to his promises, and yes he has been co-opted by the same power interests as every other President in history. Yes the media is subservient to corporate interests and political power, but that doesn’t mean Obama or these media outlets aren’t sometimes doing good work and having a positive effect. As Pazienza writes:

It’s easy to say that a sacrifice needs to be made to ostensibly teach a political party a lesson when you’re not living in the country — which Greenwald isn’t, by the way — that will look fundamentally different, and monumentally worse, in short order should the party that benefits from your act of insurrection come to power.

Glenn Greenwald isn’t the one who would be doing the sacrificing here. The whole debate for him is strictly academic. And that’s the problem.

There’s a great story in the remarkable documentary ”The Power of Nightmares’ on the rise of Al Qaeda and the Neo Cons about a sect of militant Islam in Algeria, the G.I.A (Armed Islamic Group) that was so extreme that members were killed for not conforming to the perfect ideal of a Muslim. The sect got smaller and smaller as members were killed off:

The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communique, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.

Greenwald has appointed himself the sole arbiter of the truth, and decides on his blog who is worthy and who is not. I’m not arguing that Greenwald should stop doing what he does – I’m asking him to change his tone. I’m asking him to engage with the other people rather than lecture them, and entertain the shocking notion that he could sometimes be wrong. Maybe then his work would reach people who could actually instigate some of the changes he fights so hard for.

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