“This may be a precursor of a much longer silence to come,” Ailes reportedly told colleagues. “Really, what are we going to talk about now? We’ve lost America’s greatest villain. And by that, I mean President Obama. He’s going to be untouchable now.”
Eight Months of Planning and No Action -- "A Lot of Dumb Luck"
On April 29, Obama approved an operation to kill bin Laden. Since last August, the administration had been carefully studying intelligence of an al-Qaeda courier said to be living with bin Laden, who eventually revealed the location of a fortified compound in an affluent Pakistan neighborhood. The mission required surgical precision, and to execute it, Obama chose the Navy’s elite SEAL Team Six, placing them under the command of CIA Director Leon Panetta.
However, Carlisle Olden-Whitely, chairman of San Narciso’s foremost conservative political action committee -- Association of Republican Seniors, Wives, Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs (ARSWYPE) -- warned that praise for Obama should be tempered with realism.
“I’m happy about the end result,” Olden-Whitely said, “but let’s be realistic. Obama’s success was the result of the previous administration’s efforts, combined with a lot of dumb luck. Prior to Obama, the United States went about hunting bin Laden as any good soldier would -- looking in the likely places, in caves and remote areas. Only an academic elitist like Obama would think to case out a wealthy neighborhood. Because that’s what he knows: Beverly Hills and Grosse Pointe and Manhattan and Glencoe. You can’t even get a hamburger for under a hundred bucks in Hawaii, where Obama claims he was born. No, it was a lot of circumstance, if you ask me.”
Other Republicans, while admitting that Obama’s tactic of surveillance and intelligence gathering helped bring down bin Laden, agreed that luck played a heavier hand.
“The Bush administration had a simple but completely logical approach,” a spokesperson for Dick Cheney told reporters. “Intelligence officials weren’t involved then to bog down the mission. Instead, Bush deployed troops to every country where an Islamic fundamentalist could have found safe harbor, and then he blew the holy hell out of those places. If you think about the methodology, the odds were really in our favor. Sooner or later, there would have been no place left for bin Laden to hide. But Obama’s plan -- this surgical strike gambit-- was risky and overly complex. And that’s why the American people have trouble embracing Obama. He’s just too hard to understand, too bookish and calculated. If he would have continued with the Bush strategy and destroyed Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden may have been killed a couple of years ago.”
GOP Wants Proof of bin Laden’s Death
According to official statements made by homeland security adviser John Brennan about the final battle with bin Laden, “The concern was that bin Laden would oppose any type of capture operation. Indeed, he did. It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight.”
Bin Laden even attempted to use his wife as a human shield, Brennan said.
“But this is where things get murky,” Donald Trump complained. “We’re talking about a martyr for his cause. A guy whose main weapon was suicide attack. He hid out in the wilds of Afghanistan. Now we’re told that the CIA tracked him down to a one million dollar estate in the suburbs, and that he cowered behind his wife, and that he threw his dialysis machine at soldiers, and crap like that? Doesn’t make sense. But we’ll never really know, will we, because our Muslim president gave bin Laden a Muslim funeral at sea. I call BS, and I demand to the see the long-form death certificate for Osama bin Laden. Then we’ll need to review it carefully to make sure it’s real.”
Conservative Republicans echoed Trump’s incredulity.
“Before we just accept what we’ve been told by the President,” contended Olden-Whitely, “we’ll need to be sure. There’s far too much at stake here.”
Olden-Whitely went on to illustrate just how dangerous the death of bin Laden could be for the Untied States.
“I’ve had several conversations with influential Republican leaders in Congress. There’s a lot to consider. First, if Obama’s going to call this ‘Mission Accomplished,’ does that mean he’s going to bring all the troops back home? Because we’d be destabilizing many regions where threats may still exist. From an economic standpoint, and I ran this by several members of the Budget Committee, military withdrawal could destroy U.S. industry. Our economy can’t take another hit. If the war on terror is over, we won’t be manufacturing weapons. If no perceived security threat exists, we’ll need to fire thousands of TSA agents, airport police, DHS operatives, and combat veterans. That means widespread job loss. Military suppliers will lose their no-bid government contracts and face bankruptcy. And, most importantly, we still haven’t gotten any of the oil we originally went over there for. Gas prices certainly aren’t going down. So, we’ve wasted all this time and money to kill one fairly irrelevant person. And what do we have show for it? I’ll tell you, six dollar-a-gallon gas prices this summer. I think Obama completely ignored the mission. And nothing’s been accomplished, save for a very expensive and foolhardy PR stunt to get re-elected.”
(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.
