The Daily Banter Headline Grab from AP:

Osama bin Laden’s spokesman and son-in-law has been captured by the United States, officials said Thursday, in what a senior congressman called a “very significant victory” in the ongoing fight against al-Qaida.

Abu Ghaith is expected to be in U.S. federal court in New York on Friday in an initial hearing to face terror charges, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Rep. Peter King, the former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, credited the CIA and FBI with catching al-Qaida propagandist Sulaiman Abu Ghaith in Jordan within the last week. He said the capture was confirmed to him by U.S. law enforcement officials.

A Jordanian security official confirmed that al-Ghaith was handed over last week to U.S. law enforcement officials under both nations’ extradition treaty. He declined to disclose other details and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

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By Robert Parry

When I watched the get-bin-Laden movie Zero Dark Thirty at a theater just outside Washington D.C., I was struck by how silent the audience was from beginning to end with almost no reaction to the climatic killing of the terrorist leader or to the film’s lame stabs at humor.

For instance, the screenwriters apparently thought they had crafted a funny line when the CIA officer in charge of torture says he’s returning to a desk job at CIA headquarters because he’d grown tired of seeing so many “naked men,” i.e. the detainees he’d been torturing. I heard one person in the audience emit an uncomfortable laugh.

Mostly the film played out – from its graphic scenes of torture through the plodding search for Osama bin Laden to the carefully depicted Seal Team Six assault on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan – in a silent, darkened theater.

Clearly, the strength of the movie was its documentary-style presentation of the climactic nighttime assault, though the film failed to explain how meticulously Seal Team Six had prepared for – indeed, rehearsed – the attack.

Apparently, for dramatic effect, director Kathryn Bigelow ignored that part of the story so she could pretend that her heroine, the obsessed CIA analyst Maya, was getting her CIA superior — and the White House — to act by using a magic marker to scribble the number of days she’d been waiting on the window to his office.

However, when the raid finally commences, it’s clear that many of those days had been devoted to careful preparation. Everyone in the commando unit knew precisely where they were going, what to expect, and how to proceed. What was remarkable about Bigelow’s depiction of the raid was its businesslike precision.

But my takeaway from that segment was that the commandos of Seal Team Six could best be described as methodical killers, moving through the compound and systematically killing each man they encountered, whether armed or not. After shooting a target, they then fired two more shots into the motionless body to make sure the person was dead.

While the scenes in the darkened house were nerve-wracking – even though the outcome was already known – the American attackers came across as less heroic than professional. You’re left with a sense that these warriors had been on many similar missions with similar deadly results.

As shown in the movie, the commandos displayed few emotions even when they killed bin Laden. Afterwards, they simply continue with business as usual. They corral the terrified children and the women; they rush through their work removing computer hard drives and other useful intelligence; they extract bin Laden’s corpse in a body bag; they fend off curious neighbors; they demolish a damaged helicopter; and they fly back to their base in Afghanistan where they sort out the captured intelligence and put bin Laden’s body on a gurney.

Then, for dramatic effect, director Bigelow has Maya serve as the CIA expert who conclusively identifies bin Laden’s body before she heads off to a military cargo plane where she is the only passenger for a return trip to the United States – and where she breaks down in tears.

Assessing the Raid

Despite criticism of the movie for its disputed suggestion that torture elicited important clues in the hunt for bin Laden, Bigelow deserves some credit for not transforming the raid into a moment of melodramatic catharsis.

The scene of the U.S. commandos shooting bin Laden in the head when he opens his bedroom door and then pumping a couple of extra shots into his collapsed body – while bin Laden’s children watch – is not the sort of theatrical climax that one might have expected from a John Wayne or Bruce Willis movie.

Whatever the audience felt about the necessity of killing bin Laden – as revenge for his mass murder of innocents or as prevention against him plotting more terrorist mayhem – there had to be mixed emotions at his denouement. There also should have been reflection on the various American crimes that have been committed in the years after 9/11, including the ugly torture of detainees and the bloody invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

Which brings me to my biggest criticism of Bigelow for this movie and for her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, a drama about U.S. demolition experts defusing “improvised explosive devices” in Iraq. Both movies treat the inhabitants of the countries mostly as scenery and provide almost no historical context for the events that Bigelow portrays.

In The Hurt Locker, you’re presented with a framework in which U.S. military personnel somehow find themselves in Iraq trying to save both Americans and Iraqis from bombs planted by other Iraqis, presumably because those Iraqis must be pathological “bad guys.” The American bomb crews sacrifice greatly for the benefit of all, doing their best to frustrate these evil-doers.

Bigelow treats the Iraqis as either props for her drama or as villains, i.e. crazy terrorists. If you didn’t know the history, you’d be lost regarding the background of an unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq and a military occupation that many Iraqis were resisting.

Similarly, in Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow offers the thinnest of historical context. The film starts with a black screen and 911 calls from desperate people dying in New York’s Twin Towers. It then jumps to the torturing of detainees and CIA interrogators doing the unpleasant work of extracting information to prevent future terrorist attacks.

The Missing Back Story

What’s missing is any explanation of how we all got here. The movie might have at least referenced some of that history. In summary:

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration exploited the passions of radical Islam in a conscious strategy to undermine the atheistic Soviet Union, with the CIA printing Korans for distribution in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and the neighboring Soviet provinces.

By spending billions of dollars to sponsor an Islamic jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Reagan administration attracted waves of militants from around the Arab world, including the wealthy Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden who then led bands of non-Afghan jihadis in the fight against the Soviets.

Next, George H.W. Bush’s administration joined in rebuffing overtures from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for a withdrawal of Soviet troops and Afghan peace negotiations, to be followed by a coalition government to prevent Afghanistan from descending into political anarchy.

However, senior aides to Bush, including his deputy national security adviser Robert Gates, preferred a triumphalist approach toward Gorbachev’s removal of Soviet troops and his offers of compromise. Instead of a unity government, the first Bush administration pressed for a total victory of the CIA-backed Islamists, ultimately leading to years of Afghan chaos and the eventual rise of the Taliban. [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

The Bush administration’s triumphalism also prompted President George H.W. Bush to rebuff Gorbachev’s proposals for getting Iraq to withdraw its troops from Kuwait in 1991. Bush instead favored a politically satisfying ground war that included basing American troops in Saudi Arabia, the immediate provocation that made America the new enemy for bin Laden and his Islamic extremists.

Muslims around the world also identified with the plight of the Palestinians who have faced decades of violent mistreatment at the hands of Israel – with the financial and political backing of the United States.

None of this important history is referenced in Zero Dark Thirty. Like The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s new movie just thrusts Americans into a situation where they are the victims and you get no clue as to why these Muslims keep acting so nutty, including blowing themselves up in suicide attacks.

Thus, there is an implicit racism in Bigelow’s depiction of the Muslim world, much like how Gone with the Wind treats white Southerners and African-Americans. By leaving out the outrages of slavery, Gone with the Wind encourages viewers to sympathize with the struggling Confederates.

In Bigelow’s movies, by leaving out the context of U.S. imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, you are invited to identify with the Americans and see Muslims as irrational troublemakers.

This is not to say that Bigelow is a racist. Indeed, her documentary-style presentation of the Abbottabad raid – avoiding the usual Hollywood pressures to cast everything in a simplistic “good-guy/bad-guy” frame – would argue against that suspicion. However, she does accept another troubling Hollywood cliché, focusing on the travails of white Americans operating among swarthy and dangerous Muslims.

It was Bigelow’s failure to widen the frame of Zero Dark Thirty that ultimately makes it a profoundly depressing movie, sending viewers off into the dark night with no new understanding of the whys behind this bloody struggle.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

By Ivan Eland

More than 11 years after the 9/11 attacks, the American public is still barraged with sensational media coverage of the occasional uncovering of a terrorist plot. Many of these are so-called sting operations, which, rather than saving America from significant destruction from terror attacks, have the primary effect of showing off to the public how the security agencies are providing protection in the wake of 9/11, thus justifying larger budgets for those organizations.

The security agencies typically find a lone young person of radical Islamist views and essentially turn him into an active terrorist so they can stage a very public arrest. They often use undercover government operatives to suggest targets to plot against and even offer what the duped militant thinks are real weapons to carry out the plan. Security agencies are essentially helping along people who might not otherwise commit crimes. Prohibitions exist on entrapment of citizens by law enforcement, but the courts usually side with the authorities against a designation of entrapment.

Because the 9/11 attacks had a rare high casualty rate and because these spectacular high-profile sting cases appear every so often in the media, the American people have a much exaggerated view of terrorism as a lethal problem. John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University, has calculated that the average person worldwide has a one in 80,000 chance of ever being killed by an international terrorist in his or her lifetime. These odds are about the same as those of being hit by an asteroid or comet.

In fact, governments in the United States have spent almost $700 billion over the last decade on a problem that has seen only 14 people killed by al-Qaeda sympathizers (that is, terrorists not even necessarily affiliated with al-Qaeda’s core group). That is an astounding waste of public resources on a problem that is not very deadly.

However, the security agencies and their supporters would claim that the death toll has been so low because of such official efforts. First, they cite the arrests of people trying unsuccessfully to commit terrorist acts, but as we have seen, many of these alleged threats were either essentially manufactured by the authorities or were attempted attacks by hapless “lone wolf” attackers who were merely inspired by al-Qaeda.

Also leading to suspicion that the terrorist threat has been hyped is the record of terrorism in North America prior to 9/11. According to annual State Department reports on terrorism of that era, North America regularly had a negligible number of attacks and the fewest incidents of any continent.

For the most part, North America has been far away from the world’s centers of conflict that breed terrorism, and those distances also make it hard for terrorists to operate with such long supply lines from their countries of origin. The 9/11 attacks were not only jolting for Americans because of their abnormally high casualty rate, but also because terrorism in the United States had theretofore been a minor problem.

Of course, instead of continuing to waste all of this money on government security efforts, America could be made even safer by simply meddling far less in Islamic countries. No one has ever paid much attention to this primary reason that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have given for attacking U.S. targets, because it wasn’t in the interest of politicians and security agencies to lessen the fear of voters and taxpayers, who would reward them with additional votes and dollars, respectively.

In fact, then-President George W. Bush preposterously told us that al-Qaeda was attacking us for our freedoms. This enraged bin Laden, who put out a lengthy rebuttal and tried to refocus the world on U.S. interventions in the Islamic world. But of course, at that point no one was interested in paying attention to an evil mass murderer, even though it might have been astute to ascertain what motivates an enemy to attack.

But the heyday of U.S. counterterrorism is probably now over. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda central in demise — and manufacturing lone-wolf threats to replace them hasn’t created the same urgency. Even if the fiscal cliff — promising to cut more than $100 billion per year from security budgets — is avoided, security spending is bound to decline, given political pressure to cut the deficit and public fatigue from overseas wars justified in the name of fighting terrorism.

Although Mitt Romney has pledged large increases in security spending, his resistance to raising taxes, even in the face of large budget deficits, limits the amounts that can be spent for defense, regardless of what he says. Increasing security spending without revenue increases (or even tax decreases) would necessitate unlikely drastic reductions in entitlement programs, which have more potent lobbies than even the Pentagon does.

Some money should be spent on counterterrorism, but no one should lament the budget pressure that will likely restrain the extravagant and unnecessary spending that has been based on government fearmongering.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City during the September 11 attacks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: I was taking a driving lesson in the UK when I first heard the news about the planes crashing into the twin towers. The lesson finished early and I went home to a stunned family sitting glued to the television. Like the rest of the world, I spent the next few days thinking we were on the verge of a new global war, and as the scale of the crime settled in, I knew the world – at least the one I lived in – would never really be the same again.

The attacks on 9/11 were one of the most abhorrent crimes committed in history – a shocking mass slaughter of innocents with no real precedent. Thousands of people going to work with no part of any war were killed, a great city was severely damaged and the grave psychological effects an unknown quantity. The image two passenger jets slamming into the World Trade Center serve as a reminder of human cruelty and the callous disregard for life.

But today should serve not only as a reminder of the crime, but the enormous spirit of collaboration, kindness and humanity that came after it. The world watched in amazement as Americans came together to help each other, citizens risking their lives to pull strangers out of the rubble, money flooding in from rich and poor alike to help victims, monuments, vigils, charities, support groups and a limitless well of empathy. It was an amazing spectacle and a testament to the strength of human decency in the face of brutality.

Shamefully though, the Bush Administration used the tragedy to fulfill its own grotesque ambitions – the conquering of Afghanistan and Iraq for oil that left a disaster that exceeded anything the terrorists on 9/11 could have ever wished for. Bush and Cheney’s disastrous expedition into the Middle East was built on lies and the flippant disregard for the public whom they deceived over and over again. 9/11 was used to commit more murder, more blood shed and more disaster all in the supposed name of revenge. Bush admitted that he regarded the mastermind of the attacks, Osama Bin Laden as ‘not that important’ and ‘not our priority’ as he focused his attentions on Iraq, a defenseless country that had nothing to do with the attacks.

It would take too long to get into the shameful abuses of power committed by the Bush Administration, but it is suffice to say that they added massively to the misery caused on 9/11 and today we should remember their victims – the hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan killed unnecessarily and the destruction caused to their countries that will take decades to recover from.

We will never know what Bush or Cheney’s intentions were post 9/11. Maybe they honestly believed in what they were doing and thought their actions would have a positive outcome. But they didn’t and the rest of the world now lives with the consequences.

9/11 was a tragedy and we should remember not only the Americans who died, but the Afghanis and Iraqis who suffered too. Because if we don’t, we risk repeating the same mistakes again – the belief that the outside world doesn’t matter with people whose lives are unimportant. We found out on 9/11 that our interference in the outside world has consequences, that they will fight back and use violence to achieve their ends, just as we will. Because violence begets violence, and once you start it is almost impossible to stop.

Perhaps we could remember the victims of 9/11 and pay homage to their unwitting sacrifice by stopping the cycle. And that starts with the understanding that our lives are not more important than theirs and remembering their suffering in equal part to our own.

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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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Residents of Washington, DC, celebrate the news of Osama bin Laden's death (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chez Pazienza: It’s one of those thing I haven’t wanted to admit to myself but which I know has been bubbling just below the surface of my consciousness for quite a while.

I just finished watching this week’s episode of HBO’s The Newsroom and for the record it was the single best episode of the show yet. As a former TV news producer and an avowed news junkie, it was the first installment in the series that truly captured the exhilarating, occasionally frustrating, always powerful feeling of covering not just a breaking story but one of global importance and nearly universal impact — the kind of thing, as one character mentioned in the context of the storyline, that you’ll remember being a part of for the rest of your life. The story in question, the one the cast and crew of the fictional News Night were forced to quickly leave a party and report to work to cover, was the killing of Osama bin Laden which took place on May 1st of last year. I’m honestly not sure how someone not in the news business would’ve reacted to watching the machine work as information slowly trickled in and split-second decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be reported, but for somebody who spent nearly two decades working in television news, it was nothing short of thrilling and it really did make me miss the industry to which I’d devoted so much of my life.

But after watching and remembering exactly how I felt on the evening that I learned Bin Laden was finally dead, the nagging feeling that’s been in the back of my mind for months finally presented itself front and center — because while it’s true that we had a brief moment of national solidarity in this country when we learned that the man who killed our people had been taken down, that moment was much more fleeting than it should have been. The Newsroom effectively captured the various emotions in the heads and hearts of most Americans that night, but what it didn’t get into — what it couldn’t, given the snapshot it took of one singular experience — was how quickly the event that should have brought us together and kept us that way for at least a little while was quickly turned into yet another opportunity to divide us along party lines. The fact is that it took no time at all for the killing of Osama bin Laden to become just one more piece on the chessboard of childish, all-or-nothing politics.

And that’s what’s so overwhelmingly depressing: I’m just not sure there’s anything that can cut through our poisonous political climate and bring this nation together, united in a common cause as Americans. Not anymore. Everything is now fodder for politics; our all-consuming hatreds vastly outweigh our nationalistic pride or sense of unity with our fellow citizens.

I sometimes wonder what the response would be like were another 9/11 to happen — say, tomorrow morning. I’d like to believe that we’d once again put aside the trivial concerns that divide us and the inane distractions that only casually connect us, the ridiculous tribal allegiances and eliminationist rhetoric we seem to thrive on in the age of hive mind hyper-connectivity. I’d like to believe it, but I think that doing so would be astonishingly naive. We’ve simply gone too far — pushed things well past the breaking point. There isn’t an event that we can’t now politicize. There isn’t a tragedy that we can’t find a way to blame someone from the opposite side of the political aisle for or an act of heroism or nobility for which we can’t withhold credit from our ideological adversaries. And thanks to the overwhelming number of media outlets willing to fracture us and feed us only information that confirms our already firmly held biases, I doubt very seriously that this deplorable situation will end anytime soon. If anything, it will likely only get worse.

Two days ago, a 40-year-old white supremacist named Wade Michael Page shot up a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, killing seven people who had gathered for Sunday prayer. It was the kind of senseless act of violence that should have, if nothing else, galvanized Americans in an almost uniform show of outrage and compassion. As usual, though, that’s not at all what happened. It took almost no time for Twitter to erupt into a maelstrom of ideological infighting among Americans, with those on the left pointing fingers at the toxic Islamophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the right and the right immediately creating, collating and distributing talking points to its media bullhorns demanding that they go on the offensive as a form of defense. What happened near Milwaukee seems indeed to have been a form of terrorism, but Fox News and its media satellites wasted no time in circling the wagons and fending off any implication that ultra-right-wing domestic terrorism is a threat within the United States; it’s the same response they shouted, with the same level of self-righteous indignation, when the federal government dared to bring up the subject of an in-country terrorist threat a few years ago. Because personally protecting your political point-of-view, these days, is more important than actually protecting living, breathing people. The engine of insanity that’s fueled by political articles of faith can’t ever be turned off and set aside — not for any reason.

When Osama bin Laden was killed, there were those who refused to give President Obama even an ounce of credit for the military operation that took him out. An American president, receiving not even a cursory pat on the back from the Americans he swore an oath to protect and to whom he kept that oath — because, again, scoring political points for the party was more important than being an American. I truly believe that, were to we to be attacked again, we wouldn’t see a rallying around the president that we witnessed almost uniformly in 2001. We’d simply get more blame. More rhetoric. More outrage at the failed ideology of the other side of the aisle. More stupid, stupid politics. Because this is all we’re capable of anymore.

We’re ruining this country of ours because so many of us have no sense of country.

The latest Fox News-generated “controversy” is over whether Gabby Douglas and other U.S. Olympians are displaying enough patriotism because their uniforms don’t feature the stars and stripes prominently. Even the Olympics aren’t safe.

It used to be that our differences were what made America strong — now our differences are what make America non-existent.

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Dennis McShane writes a bleak warning to the British Left in the New Statesman on the likelihood of a Romney Presidency, a prospect they should prepare for if they find themselves in power:

In America,  the liberal-left dislike of Romney may not be enough to offset the Obama record. The “Yes we can” élan of 2008 has turned into the “No we couldn’t” morosity of 2012. Figures from the US Survey of Consumer Finances show that the median US family is now no better off than 20 years ago. The Clinton and Bush years made rich Americans ever richer but median family income has fallen from $49,600 in 2007 to $45,800 in 2010 under Obama….

Like Jimmy Carter persuading himself he could bring the Soviet leader Leonid Breshnev into a relationship with America, Obama thought that  if he pressed the “reset” button with Russia, there would be harmony between the White House and the Kremlin. Putin has made no concessions and still believes America is out to get him. As a result, Obama has been quagmired on Syria, on Iran, on the Balkans, and has no foreign policy pluses to show. He has not moved on the Middle East and his war in Afghanistan drags on and on like the last years in Vietnam. Drone strikes have alienated Pakistan and while Osama Bin Laden is dead, jihadi terrorism isn’t. To be sure, Obama hasn’t been helped by the worst generation of leaders in Europe since the 1930s.  Unlike Thatcher with Reagan or Blair with Clinton, Obama has little bond with Britain’s Old Etonian prime minister who is bored by foreign affairs and believes in economics most Americans think come from Downton Abbey times.

McShane may be presenting a pretty pessimistic view of the race, but it’s worth taking seriously as global leaders may have to prepare for another ideologue in charge of the most powerful country in the world. The prospects are pretty horrifying given Romney’s behavior on his recent foreign policy tour, and everyone will have to go back to worrying about what insane, unilateral policy the White House decides to implement in the name of America power and free markets.

McShane aimed his piece at the British Left, but I think the message is salient for pretty much every leader of every industrialized nation (other than perhaps Israel). Romney is so far to the Right that the British National Party looks reasonably moderate in comparison, making conservatives in Spain, Germany and Britain look like Commie pinkos. There’s a lot working for Obama in this election (namely the awfulness of Mitt Romney), but as we’ve learned in the past, never underestimate the power of voter apathy. If the Left falls asleep in America, Romney wins, and the world becomes a much more difficult place to navigate.

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President Obama oversees the assassination of Osama Bin Laden

Bob Cesca: In the absence of anything realistic and feasible to say, the Republicans have all along made an effort to attack the president — not in the name of substantive alternatives to his policies — but for every day basic things all modern presidents do.

It began even before the president was elected when far-right apparatchiks made a national stink over so-called “Greek columns” on the dais at the Democratic National Convention, even though countless politicians have been pictured with columns behind them, chiefly because Washington, DC is loaded with them. Everywhere. Inside the White House, outside the White House, at the Capitol building, at various memorials and all points in between.

Then it was the Teleprompter meme. Evidently the president isn’t allowed to use a prompter even though every president since the invention of the Teleprompter has used one — especially Reagan and subsequent chief executives. But when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the use of prompters suddenly became an impeachment-worthy trespass. Honestly, this one is kind of hilarious to me because now the Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. The ridiculousness of this attack has forced them to not use prompters during their own addresses, consequently they’ve been forced to awkwardly read from printed remarks, note cards or they have to just wing it.

Some of Mitt Romney’s biggest gaffes and verbal disasters have occurred when he’s winging it without notes or prompters. So, you know, good job on inexplicably demonizing Teleprompters, Republicans.

Next up, according to the Republicans, it’s against the rules to mention Osama Bin Laden in the context of finally getting him. When President Obama merely noted the success of the raid that killed Bin Laden one year after the event, he was excoriated. Yet here was just about every modern Republican leader at the 2004 convention:

Yeah, they were all kinds of subtle, weren’t they?

And now, they’re telling us that President Obama isn’t allowed to promote the benefits Americans will receive under the new healthcare reform law. The Department of Health and Human Services is requesting $20 million to instruct Americans what they can expect from the Affordable Care Act. Here are the predictable reactions from the predictable characters, via ThinkProgress:

– SARAH PALIN: “This is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard coming out of the Obama administration. Not only is this, of course, pending in court, and I think it will be deemed unconstitutional, but this is a propaganda piece, which I think violates many of the procurement laws and other laws applicable to government contracts. This is propaganda. It’s just promoting ‘ObamaCare.’” [Fox News, 5/22/2012]

– JOHN MCCAIN: “Outrageous waste of taxpayer $ to promote #Obamacare – ‘HHS signs $20M PR contract to promote healthcare law’ [Twitter, 5/22/2012]

– ROY BLUNT: “It’s unacceptable that Pres Obama intends to waste $20M on the taxpayer’s dime to sell U.S. on unpopular #ObamaCare” [Twitter, 5/22/2012]

– RON JOHNSON: “$20M for marketing #ObamaCare? This is a wasteful & inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” [Twitter, 5/22/2012]

Now, on the surface, $20 million seems like a lot. But considering the expenses involved, it’s understandable. Television spots alone could absorb most of that budget. And, by the way, correct me if I’m wrong but healthcare is kind of important — and knowing the changes in the system might be in the best interest of the people.

So how much is $20 million compared with prior efforts to promote changes in the healthcare laws?

In 2006, the Bush administration requested $126 million to promote the benefits in the Medicare Modernization Act. The Bush administration routinely spent millions of dollars on actual propaganda efforts in which they disguised administration talking points in the form of fake news stories. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2004 that this process was “misleading… and may also have illegally used public money to make what in effect were fake news reports about the law that did amount to propaganda.”

The Republicans will absolutely continue down this road. I’m expecting attacks against the president’s use of a military jet (Air Force One), a podium and that extravagantly ornate mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. Elitist.

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