Couldn’t agree more:

…I can happily report that I completely underestimated the skill, courage, and perseverance of America’s military. And, almost as happily, I can report that I also completely underestimated the capacity of America’s erstwhile “peace community” for turning on a dime and embracing the kind of all-American xenophobic flag-waving bloodlust they only recently decried. So today I stand proudly with my new friends of the formerly antiwar left in a mindlessly jingoistic salute to President Obama for an extralegal military assassination well done…

…Of course, I’m not naive enough to think our current wave of national unity will last forever. At some point, possibly after the next election, American troops will once again assume their traditional role of psychotic baby-killing objects of fear and pity. And, doubtlessly, those of us who still admire them must once again assume our traditional role as America’s flag-humping racist chickenhawks. But when that day comes, we can look back at the week of May 1, 2011 and realize that it isn’t personal. Hey, that’s just the way the chad crumbles.

From Consumer Affairs:

The psychological price-point of $4 a gallon is looming straight ahead, and will likely be hit before the end of the week, based on the rate of recent price escalation.

The national average price of self-serve regular today is $3.967 a gallon, according to AAA’s Fuel Gauge Survey. That’s nearly a dime a gallon more than seven days ago…

I paid $3.95 the other day; I can easily see $4.50 by Memorial Day…

Not good news – from Ynet:

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi spoke with his Egyptian counterpart Nabil al-Araby on Monday evening for the first time since the uprising in Egypt.

Salehi said at press conference on Tuesday that cooperation with Egypt, especially in the political arena, “will help establish stability, security and peace in the region.”

He also praised Egypt for its role in the reconciliation of Fatah and Hamas. “Palestinian unity is the key factor in empowering the resistance against the Zionist enemy,” he said…

So, two of the most powerful Moslem powers are drawing closer together – and agreeing that its a swell idea to have Hamas and Fatah united in governing Gaza and the West Bank. With news out of Syria being couched in terms of “if Assad is ousted it will be a bloodbath” (and, so, we’d better not work to overthrow Assad), we can see the start of a re-alignment in the Middle East…with Israel under greater threat, America having less influence and war much more likely.

We came so close – in 2004, the Middle East was ours to command. Had we just keep up the pressure and taken the next step (which would have been regime change in Syria and Iran), then the fundamental problem of Islamism would have been well on the way to solution. President Bush tried, but it was all he could do to merely stay the course in Iraq – the political pressure was so intense against him that he didn’t have the ability to advance. And now we’ve got a President who wants to retreat – with the worry now that the death of bin Laden will be taken as an excuse to cut and run out of Afghanistan…thus leaving that nation to become either Iran or Pakistani dominated.

All in all, we’re being pushed back to the margins – no one trusting either our willingness to fight, and thus not trusting us to be a worthy friend or foe in the region’s development. We’re just looking on events, hoping they don’t come ’round to bite us. But bite us they will – because those making the running in the Middle East today are the Islamists who wish our death. We’ll be a decade repairing the damage the left did to our position in the Middle East – and part of the price to be paid will be in blood.

That is from the movie Breaker Morant; set in the waning days of the Boer War, the issue is the trial of some British officers for murder. The Boer War was the first of the modern, twilight wars where national armies were pitted against a shadowy enemy who lived among ostensibly civilian personnel, and whose rule of war was ambush, and often cruelty. In order to counter these tactics, the British engaged in a lot of different sorts of actions – including the use of what we would call “counter-insurgency” operations; men trained to operate and fight like the enemy. In such actions, hard men were called upon to do very rough things – and for political reasons it was eventually considered expedient for the British government to disassociate itself from the forces they had raised.

Such is war – a terrible thing. During war, many things can be done in the heat of battle which in the cool light of hindsight appear unwise, perhaps even wicked. In the Breaker Morant story, the point was whether it was really right and proper to try men for things done in battle – can a man really commit murder on a battlefield? This is a question without answer – and which can never be answered. But all of us who have not had to walk in such shoes must be very slow to judge those who have.

It is to be hoped that liberals will now reflect. Here is an event – the killing of bin Laden – which was an action under “Rule .303”. We took him and we shot him under Rule .303. It was a hard deed; but some times such things are necessary. And some times it is necessary to roughly handle other enemies, in other circumstances. Liberals expressed shock and horror over waterboarding as well as other tactics used in this war – what of shooting an unarmed man? Which is worse? In truth, neither is worse – because depending on the circumstances, either can be the correct action.

When ever a human being contemplates shedding the blood of another, the default position must be to err on the side of mercy. If an excuse can be found or a mitigating circumstance determined, that is the course to be taken. But after considering it in that light, after praying over the various actions contemplated, it is determined that a hard deed must be done, then those of us who had no part in the decision or the carrying out of the mission should be wary of sitting in judgment. We don’t know the pressures the decision maker and the actors were under – we weren’t them, and we weren’t there. A bit of empathy goes a long way – and would have done liberals a lot of good 2001-2009. It is to be hoped that now they’ve directly blood on their own hands, liberals will start to learn a bit of wisdom.

And now back to our regularly scheduled economic collapse – from Zero Hedge:

Today SNAP released the most recent food stamp numbers. Not surprisingly, we just saw another all time high 44.2 million poverty-level Americans relying on government funding for day to day sustenance. Granted the number appears to be plateauing, so all those who bought the change if not the ho[y]pe, can rejoice as it may start declining next month: a development that is sure to be herald for Obama a 4th Putin-esque term…

We’re now at the tail end of the Obama Boom – that bit of economic “growth” propelled by massive money printing and borrowing. The big question: now, what? Does the economy take off like a shooting star without government subsidy and thus create an economy for Obama’s re-election, or does it immediately sag down in to renewed recession, thus ensuring President Palin on January 20th, 2013?

No one can say for certain, but the fact that we’re borrowing like mad, our dollar is collapsing and gasoline is just below $4 and may rise to $5 indicates a rocky future for our economy. Maybe Obama will eventually get us up to a round 50 million on food stamps before he’s done…

How did the left describe the Seal team that did in bin Laden? From the Washington Examiner:

Under Bush, JSOC was routinely smeared by the left and placed at the center of many Bush/Cheney conspiracy theories. Specifically, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh alleged it was Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad:

“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.“…

Remember these liberals crowing now – they hated the military all through President Bush’s term and took every opportunity to slander them. Don’t forget – don’t let them off the hook; keep reminding them what they used to say…and what they will say, again, when a Republican is President.

From the National Post:

Canadians elected a historic government to office on Monday, handing the Conservatives their long-coveted majority and promoting the NDP to Official Opposition status for the first time ever.

The Liberals were reduced to less than half the seats they won in the last election, and the Bloc Quebecois dwindled to just a handful of seats in a province that, for the first time in 20 years, handed the majority of its seats to a federalist party.

The damage to the Liberals and Bloc was so severe that even leaders Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe were on track to lose their seats in Ontario and Quebec…

…With all 308 ridings reporting as of 11:50 p.m. EST, the Tories were leading or had won 165 seats — well past the 155 needed for a majority — and the NDP were leading or had won 104 ridings — nearly tripling the 36 seats it gleaned in 2008. A decimated Liberal Party was on track to win just 35 seats, and the Bloc Quebecois were poised to glean just three…

Congratulations to Mr. Harper – and a hope that this is a harbinger of things to come down south.

From ABC:

…in 2004, top al-Qaida operative Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq. Ghul told the CIA that al-Kuwaiti was a courier, someone crucial to the terrorist organization. In particular, Ghul said, the courier was close to Faraj al-Libi, who replaced Mohammed as al-Qaida’s operational commander. It was a key break in the hunt for in bin Laden’s personal courier.

“Hassan Ghul was the linchpin,” a U.S. official said…

…The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.

“We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,” said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden…

And Ghul was captured, where? Yes, it was in Iraq…in Iraq, the place liberals said we were never supposed to go, where we found the key link in the chain which eventually led to bin Laden’s.

The bottom line is that it took the whole process – the whole of nearly ten years to get to the bottom of this and get bin Laden. Now, the one thing we can’t ever take away from President Obama is that he gave the order for the final operation – he’ll always have that to his credit. But to try and pretend that Obama came along and turned defeat in to victory is just plain and simple absurd – stupidly absurd. In other words, the sort of thing only the most rank, ignorant and partisan of liberals could possibly think.

We never were and never will be engaged in a war against one man – or even one terrorist organization. We fight against a wicked ideology – Islamo-fascism being the best name for this. Bin Laden was a leader of these sorts of people and groups, but he was never supreme, nor was he ever alone. And he gained his ability not out of his own head, but out of the socio-political realities of the Moslem world. A hopelessly dysfunctional society slipping day by day further in to barbarism. Unless we cure that – and the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are the only sure ways we’ve seen to do this – then the war will both go on, and could eventually be lost by us.

Celebrate that our soldiers did their duty. Be content that justice was done to Osama bin Laden. But don’t confuse yourself and don’t fall for a simple narrative of what happened, or what needs to be done.

UPDATE: Obama’s Heroics – from Top of the Ticket:

…According to early reports of the incident, detailed here in The Ticket, 24 SEALs rappelled down ropes from hovering Chinooks in post-midnight darkness Monday Pakistan time with Osama security forces shooting at them. Brennan didn’t have much time to go into all that today, the goal is to elevate the ex-state senator to at least a one-star commander-in-chief…

Gee, wonder what everyone will want to talk about, today?

Well, if you have had your fill of dead bin Ladens – and Obamas taking credit for it and liberals crowing as if they ever agreed with fighting a war – then you might want to discuss:

Looks like we didn’t kill any Ghaddafi-larvae.

Knew I should have sold my silver last week...but, the way Bernanke’s going, I can probably sell it next week, instead.

Jerry Brown proposes to loot California’s taxpayers in order to reward his union friends. Anyone who thought that the Brown Administration would end well in California just wasn’t paying attention.

It is National Offend a Feminist Week. Well, come on, go offend one, already.

And, of course, feel free to talk about bin Laden still being dead.

From Rasmussen:

Twenty-one percent (21%) of Likely U.S. Voters say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken the week ending Sunday, April 24. It’s the fourth week in a row that the measurement has gone down, with confidence in the nation’s course now reaching the lowest point of the Obama presidency…

It’ll probably go back up a bit with the news that bin Laden has been killed – but bin Laden dead doesn’t help pay the bills. In the end, only an actual change of direction will get people convinced we’re heading the right way. The policies of borrow and spend just aren’t working – and Obama seems utterly clueless about both the ineffectiveness of his policies as well as their unpopularity.

It will be a long road to 2012, but the payoff will be the end of the biggest mistake America ever made.