Are you starting to feel the media are spiking more footballs as the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's execution nears than the President himself?
On CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, the host actually called this "the biggest decision" of Barack Obama's presidency (video follows with transcript and commentary):
PIERS MORGAN: On Friday, April 29, 2011, at 8:20 AM, Barack Obama took the biggest decision of his presidency – gave the order to send a team of Navy SEALs into Pakistan to capture and if necessary kill Osama bin Laden. Had the mission gone wrong, President Obama would now be facing a landslide defeat in the election in November. But it went right. Bin Laden, the man who ordered the worst terrorist atrocity in American history on 9/11 was shot dead. And the nation celebrated. […]
President Obama staked everything on that order last April determined to bring bin Laden to justice as he promised to do. That fact he was successful was a great relief to the country, and a great credit to the heroic SEALs who carried out the job for him. […]
Today surely is a chance to put partisan politics to one side and to pay tribute again to the president on a bold decision and especially to the SEALs on a brilliant, successful operation. And, most importantly, to celebrate the fact that thanks to their collective actions, America is now a safer place than it was on April 28, 2011.
Let's start there: Is America actually a safer place than it was on April 28, 2011?
North Korea under new leadership just tested a ballistic missile and seems hell-bent on expanding its ability to deliver nuclear weapons.
Iran is far closer to nukes of its own, and Israel seems a heartbeat away from preemptively attacking it likely dragging America into another Middle East conflict.
As for Afghanistan, Hope Hodge at Human Events reported hours ago: "Attacks on coalition troops from insiders--Afghan police and soldiers--have grown steadily. This year, so far, there have already been 13 such attacks, 10 of them fatal, compared with 21 attacks in total for 2011 and 11 for 2010, according to AP reports."
Indeed. April was an extremely costly month for America in Afghanistan with 33 of our soldiers being killed there.
Hodge continued, "And outside of Afghanistan, al Qaeda presence has proliferated, even in the wake of bin Laden’s death, in regions including Iraq, Yemen, and Africa, and the terrorist organization’s new leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, remains on the loose in Pakistan. Al Qaeda attacks in Iraq have actually increased since bin Laden’s assassination, according to reports."
When you add it all up, America doesn't seem at all safer as a result of bin Laden's execution, does it?
No matter what the Supreme Court does in June regarding the individual mandate, this is going to be far more important for Obama in November than killing bin Laden. It's not even close.
Beyond which, this will impact far more people for far more years than the absence of bin Laden.
On top of this, the decisions to bail out General Motors as well as spend almost $800 billion on what appears to be a largely failed stimulus plan are far greater election year issues than the former al Qaeda leader, especially with the tenuous nature of the current recovery.
As for the hit Obama's presidency would have taken if the mission failed, that would certainly depend on what kind of a failure it was. Was there American loss of life, or did it just turn out the intelligence was wrong and bin Laden wasn't there?
In reality, unless this resulted in significant loss of life or turned into some huge foreign policy embarrassment, it seems hard to imagine it being a bigger political hot potato than ObamaCare, the stimulus, or the auto bailout.
As such, it seems Morgan's ode to Obama was just another instance of the liberal media doing a victory lap for a president doing his own.
With all these folks running around the same track at the same time, it's amazing they haven't bumped into each other.
