I’ve been puzzled by how the Obama administration could take such an unambiguously good event as the death of Osama Bin Laden, and roll out the news so ineptly, but Victor Davis Hanson explained it in the latest Ricochet podcast.
If this had happened during the Bush administration, the story would have been: we went in and shot him, he’s dead, ooo-rah. There would not have been any hand-wringing about whether this was the right thing to do. But the Obama administration is different. They are profoundly uncomfortable with extra-judicial killings. Their allies in the media attacked US special forces (which includes the team that took out Bin Laden) as the Dick Cheney’s assassination squad. In 2009, Eric Holder was even unable to answer the question of whether Bin Laden, if captured, would need to be read a Miranda warning.
As a result, a story that would have been good enough as-is for President Bush needed to be embellished for President Obama. Hence we were told he was taken in a firefight, he was resisting, using a human shield, etc. All of that was to provide an excuse for why we didn’t take him alive, read him his rights, and whisk him off to a civilian jail. All of that was to provide answers to questions no one outside the far-far-left would ask. Unfortunately for Obama, his administration has internalized the far-far-left.
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