I just watched the full half-hour interview of Jon Stewart on Bill O’Reilly’s show. The first half of it is quite worth watchin:

The best you will ever do in a political argument of this type is get your opponent to admit that you make some good points, just as Jules says to Vincent at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. But this is rare—especially in a public setting. The way I know I’ve won an argument with someone is when their argument keeps getting changed. This is how I know that Stewart beat O’Reilly all to hell. O’Reilly starts out by saying that no one should be allowed to the Whitehouse who has defended a cop killer. Stewart brings up two examples of others who have done so without O’Reilly flying into a rage (most important, Bono who visited Bush Jr. in the Whitehouse), Suddenly, it isn’t about the fact that Common wrote approvingly about someone he claims was wrongly accused of killing a cop; now it is about the fact that Common visited this person in jail. And it goes on like that. If the argument went on long enough, O’Reilly’s entire case would be that Common has a high-carb diet.

O’Reilly is not really what most people think he is. He has a number of liberal positions on gun control and early-term abortion. But these are just the smokescreen of an smart hater. The entire appeal of his show (and most of Faux News) is that it allows angry people something to be angry about. So O’Reilly has these nice beliefs so he can say, “I can’t be pigeonholed.” But the fact remains that his show is only about anger. He could be a socialist and still do his show. Politics doesn’t really matter. What matters is, “Look at this outrage!”

I’m late getting to this, but I wanted to comment on something that President Obama said on 60 Minutes: “Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.” So I guess I need my head examined—but people have been saying that for years, so it shouldn’t shock me that the President of the United States has joined the chorus.

Let me make one thing clear: there are a lot of people whose deaths would make the world a better place and Osama bin Laden was definitely high on that list while he was still alive. I’m not sorry that he’s dead; the world is a better place.

Justice Was Done?

My first complaint is: was justice done? We are at war with al-Qaeda, so we have put them in the place of a country. As far as I know (and I am no expert on this, so I could be wrong), it is against the rules of war to attempt to assassinate the leaders of the country we are at war with. For me, this is like the torture debate. Even if those we fight torture our people, we do not torture their people because that is not who we are. President Obama touched on this when he talked about how we provided bin Laden with an honorable funeral.

Of course, that’s all fantasy because we aren’t in fact at war with al-Qaeda. This was a police action—albeit, carried out by the military. Osama bin Laden was akin to a guy who hires a hitman to kill his wife. All the people who actually killed the roughly 3000 people on 9/11 are dead. So I’m against the military storming the bin Laden compound and shooting him, but not for the reasons you might think. So far as I know, bin Laden ran into a small room when he saw the troops. When the troops entered the room, they found bin Laden hiding behind two of his wives. The troops pushed the women aside. I have not heard any credible reporting that bin Laden was even armed, much less prepared to shoot. In other words, he could easily have been taken alive. But he wasn’t and it is clear why: this was an assassination mission; they had no intention of taking him alive.

That’s what police do, right? They don’t just shoot suspects. And let us not forget that in our culture Osama bin Laden was just a suspect. I think he should have been treated like the banal criminal who he was. Now he’s a martyr for the cause.

The Good Guys

My second complaint is why it is such a big deal that those 3000 deaths were American. Iraqi mothers don’t grieve when their innocent child are accidentally (I use the term advisedly) killed? For that matter, are the wives and children of bin Laden not grieving over his death? Death is death and let’s not let ourselves believe the myth that American lives matter more just because we happened to live in the same country.

But I’m a child. I still hang on to all those ideals I learned in civics classes. I still believe the Cold War rhetoric that taught me that we were different from those other countries that tortured and invaded and set children against their parents. But intellectually, I know: we do torture, we just call it something else; we do invade, we just claim we have just cause or have been invited; and we set children against their parents as all over the nation school children are told to report to the police their drug using parents. But emotionally, I still believe we’re the guys in the white hats. Although Obama didn’t mean it this way, I do need to have my head examined.