Osama Bin Laden Killed by USA - Mission FINALLY Accomplished

Now here's a coincidence for you: it was EXACTLY 8 years ago today that then President George W. Bush, in a weird burst of telepathy, announced "Mission Accomplished".....in Iraq. 

Iraq had NOTHING to do with the September 11th attacks, but we didn't know anything yet that day.

Iraq was supposed to somehow relate to the Sept.11th bombings and Osama bin Laden, but it didn't, at all.

President Bush on 03/19/03, announcing the beginning of "Operation Iraqi" Freedom, to"liberate" Iraq.

 Nor did they have any "weapons of mass destruction", or yellow cake uranium, or anything that could have posed an immediate  threat to the United States. 

Shock and Awe "liberated" this child...

Well, other than a bad attitude, made much worse by our Shock and Awe invasion (above) , and now they have much less. (Oops, sorry, wrong country- our bad.) 

May 1st, 2003: "Mission Accomplished" sez Prez. (Not quite, dude, but nice banner)

Obviously the "mission" wasn't accomplished in 2003, but a frightened populace supposedly  re-elected Bush for a 2nd term so he could "get the job done", thinking it a bad idea to "change horses in midstream".  But even with another 4 years in office, Bush wasn't able to bring bin Laden to justice, or to bring a stable democratic government to Iraq, so there were years of utterly pointless military and civilian deaths in Iraq before President Barack Obama actually got our ground troops out.

President Obama announced the killing of bin Laden by US forces on Sunday, May 1st, 2011

President Bush (for whom "Yee-ha!" took the place of foreign policy), had also invaded Afghanistan , sending troops to look in "caves and spider holes" for the Mastermind of 9-11.  But as it turns out, Osama bin Laden wasn't there, either. (Oops, so sorry, wrong country again). Were our faces red!


As it turns out, Osama was, for the last 5 years evidently,  living in relative luxury in Pakistan, and was killed by Navy Seals in a fire fight outside a mansion (not a cave, as Bush said), near Islamabad today, May 1st, 2011. FINALLY!


Hopefully this will be some comfort to 9-11 survivors and the nation in general, and although it's a very complicated issue, hopefully it means that we can get out of Afghanistan sooner, too, since we're kinda involved in other issues now....

....like absolutely terrifying levels of debt for starters; disaster-movie-style scary weather (record tornado outbreaks in the deep south, enormous wildfires on the drought-parched range of West Texas, spectacular flooding in the Midwest, etc).... 

....and there's Arab Spring, the unrest as the rest of the Middle East undergoes a prolonged political revolutionary  earthquake, the end result of which is still unknown.....

....not to mention that our infrastructure desperately needs expensive maintenance and upgrading, before things like nuclear power plants and bridges fall  apart...

Like the President said last week, "we've got other stuff to do", so let's get our troops out of harm's way in Afghanistan and bring them home ASAP.


A little history: the current War in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, in response to the September 11th attacks, when President Bush launched "Operation Enduring Freedom" along with British and Afghan Northern Alliance forces.

Afghanistan collage from Wikipedia

The mission was to dismantle al-Qaeda and to end the use of Afghanistan as a base for terrorist operations; we were trying to somehow remove the Taliban regime and specifically institute democracy, presuming that the people wanted it. (Evidently most just wanted a life with less misery, whatever the political context.) 


As I write this, it's 12:15am EDT, and a massive and still-growing crowd of noisy, positively joyous demonstrators has collected in front of the White House and at Times Square, waving US flags, chanting "USA, USA, USA, USA!", valiantly trying to sing the Star-Spangled Banner (hey, it's a hard song!) and God Bless America, and generally manifesting a skyrocketing level of morale. 

It's been awhile since I saw anything like this; Tuesday, January 20, 2009?

We sure as Hell DID!

I couldn't help but wonder what the Tea Party and other Obama haters are doing right now? so I Googled the subject and found that the Tea Party thinks this announcement was made solely to deflect attention from a lawsuit in the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena questioning Obama’s eligibility to hold the office of President, the oral arguments beginning tomorrow morning, May 2nd at 9am. Ass-hats.

Those Tea Partiers are SO smart; they can see things that normal people can't...

Speaking of the mentally ill, what about the "truthers"? Frantically trying to find a way to blame Obama for not doing it sooner?  No, not at all; they just don't believe it surprise surprise; they realized right away that it was another Wag-the-Dog-like hoax. Plus they don't think bin Laden had anything to do with September 11th anyway, so they're just laughing at the rest of us gullible sheep as we obsess about it and/or celebrate. Whatever. This century, so far, seems to be all about paranoia and delusion; not quite the Age of Aquarius yet, huh?