Silence is Golden, Amongst Other Things

I have to grudgingly give the president credit for doing something right today:  He chose not to give one of his haughty, condescending campaign speeches at Ground Zero.  Thank you, Mr. President.  Seriously.  If you had degraded the memory and suffering of the fallen and surviving with your unending partisanship, I think my head would have blown clean off.

Osama Bin Laden is dead.  Whether you pushed this or were driven into it by the people around you, I don't know if we'll ever know for certain.  We're glad it's over.  Finally, justice for the families and the fallen...  but then you go and do this weird ritual Islamic funeral rite with hurry-up burial at sea... and refuse to release the pictures.  Why?  You really believe that the jihadis will like us better and not kill us so fast if we're nice to their dead mass-murdering terrorist leaders?  I thought you went to Columbia and Harvard, don't you have to be smarter than that to get into those schools?  And what's the hurry ditching the body anyway?  If this guy was a Jew, with similar burial issues, I bet he'd still be chilling in the freezer, so to speak.

There are two real possibilities here.  One is that Al Qaeda is a for-real, existential threat to America, and the other is that it is not.  If it is, apparently I am supposed to believe that for the past ten years they've had operatives waiting around to attack America if we ever got around to killing Bin Laden, but otherwise pretty much doing nothing in the meantime.  And now they're hopping mad, and if you really want to see them have a kiniption, just release those photos and watch them go nuclear, perhaps literally.  Yeah.  We'd better kowtow to them and make sure we don't do or say anything to agitate them.  This seems to be the president's position.  He told us OBL didn't represent Islam, he told us Islam was the religion of peace, but then he's tripping over himself to make sure we treat the body in some (apparently incorrect it turns out) Islamic ritual so we don't anger the soldiers of the religion of peace the former owner of the body wasn't really a part of so they don't kill the snot out of us.  Man, I'm getting a headache.  Are you kidding me?

Then there's the other possibility, that Al Qaeda isn't really much of a threat at all.  This one's almost scarier.  If Al Qaeda is a real and serious threat, then our president's behavior looks a little chicken-youknowwhat, but otherwise makes a sorry sort of sense.  However, if Al Qaeda is not a real threat, and they know it, that's where things get ugly.  Then, this business is about making Al Qaeda look like a real threat, and the question becomes, "Why?"  And off we go into the deepest end of conspiracy theory.  But also, we then have to find another reason for the president's bowing and scraping to "muslim sensitivities".  (I know, I know, he insists he's a Christian, and he goes to churches that have "baptist" in the name every few months for street cred and the media and the slower among professing Christianity eat it up.  Problem is, he keeps picking churches that aren't actually Christian in the Jesus sense.  He picks churches that preach something other than the plain gospel of Christ.  Why would he do that?  Ignorance?  Columbia and Harvard.  The smartest president since, well, ever.  Brilliant, intelligent, thoughtful...  and ignorant?  No, there has to be something else to this.)

I want to think that the problem is simply that the president is misguided in his understanding of Christianity, a little over-tolerant when it comes to Islam, but otherwise sincere.  However, it's like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.  It just don't go.  I keep coming back to two ideas.  One, the president is somewhere on a line between wannabe-Muslim (look up "taqiyya") and Muslim sympathizer, and two, making Al Qaeda seem scarier than the Arabic-speaking Keystone Cops that they are serves a purpose...  or maybe both are true; there's nothing mutually exclusive about them.  Never let a crisis go to waste...  and if you end up solving your crisis, just go on acting like it's still a crisis?