Ted Rall for August 31, 2012

Rall, this ‘toon of yours is full of lies. I thought you’d have one about the DNC, not old news like Bin Laden.

No chance to surrender? Come on. He had a couple of years to surrender. And he got a more dignified burial than if they’d just flown a plane into his house and let it collapse on him.

When it comes to hitmen, it’s hard to beat the Navy Seals.

Aw, poor Osama! And he was such a fair man, too. Just look at how he treated all those people in the tower.

For some odd reason, I’m not upset with a mafia style rubout of Osama.

2012 is bizarre

Swiftboat as usual.

I for one could care less how Osama Bin Hidding got it. I just regret that it took so long and cost so much. Can anyone explain why we don’t do the same to Khalid Shiek Mohammed?The government works in strange ways. On one hand they’ll take months of planning, travel half a world away and risk our soldiers lives to assassinate one terrorist, yet keep another confessed murderer terrorist in custody for a decade to make sure his rights aren’t violated.

In addition, if Obama had given the order to kill bin Laden, and something went wrong, and one or two SEALS were killed, or a helicopter crashed, or Pakistan started shooting back, or bin Laden got away – which were among the many possible outcomes . . . Can you image how happy Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity; NeoCons would have been! They would be crowing about it every day for the last 16 months!

I should add, of course, that the fact that none of those outcomes occurred is a testament to the skill, training and professionalism of the Special Operations forces.

Rice ignored the specific warnings, and we were all waiting for W to do something, anything (carpet bombing two ancillary countries was not it). W let bin Laden escape during his botched invasion of Afghanistan and Tora Bora. Obama is just cleaning up this mess once and for all. A trial would have been epic, but I’m not too disturbed by rubbing out someone like Osama bin Laden.

I believe he confirmed they may have disobeyed orders by killing if capture was possible. The only question I have is was capture possible after the first shots from the stairs. Have no problem with first shots under circumstance but do question authors firing into wounded unarmed target.

Where have all our values gone? Certainly not to the Republicants. And Obama should be ashamed of himself if they had a chance to bring Osama back for trial and didn’t take it. I know it would have been very messy, but, non the less we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not dictators.

Really – its not something new that he wouldn´t have been armed. They also said he hid behind one of his wifes at the time – so its obviously political slander, or serious case of horrible (selective) memory.

I would have been just as happy if shrubster & cheney had done their job and caught osama bin ladin in exactly the same manner. But, it didn’t. My opinion of shrubster & cheney is as low as it can go. Those two, plus others on that destructive team should be in jail for what they did to America when they occupied the White House.

Ted is doing his job — testing the limits. I’m not surprised that he offends people sometimes, and I think he offended me this time, but he’s not in business to be polite. If you can’t mount a good argument against his point, then maybe he’s right, and if you can, well, it’s good that he made you think it through.

Well, no, Obama has run things in a marginally more competent manner. I doubt Obama would have saddled the Afghanis with Karzai.He also saw the light on getting out of Iraq & seems to have seen the light on Afghanistan. We had nothing to gain with either of those occupations, and we lost far too much. Just as Israel finally realized that their occupation of southern Lebanon was useless, we are not going to be successful in countering Al-Qaeda with military occupations.Unfortunately, Obama hasn’t learned the lesson that Mossad style, secret ‘hit-man’ operations don’t work in the long run either.

I wish he would’ve. And no, I don’t think bin Laden needed a trial. I think he just needed to be gunned down.

While I agree with much of your post, I’d argue that Ted’s job is not to test the limits. If the cartoon is “gross and disingenuous”, is it not a disservice to the viewer. Point out the faults – yes. Exaggerate the flaws – yes. Make up nonsense that distorts the truth to an unrecognizable degree – NO!

As Nietzsche said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”America, generally, has not been careful and sadly for the most part has itself become a monster. We have allowed the savagery of some to let us become a savage nation (or more so, as there have always been nasty war crimes going on). It is sad that so many people fall into the trap of giving up on their humanity in fear of terrorism, or whatever scares them.

And how did we “panic and throw away a system of legal protection” by going after Osama? He took pride in admitting what he had done. Please don’t waste my time with suggestions that he and his ilk deserve a “fair trial”. I’m too close to Fort Hood to swallow that one.

I have a serious problem with many news programs, and with comments on this forum, in that they seem to accept the new book as gospel. As far as I am concerned, the author is hiding behind an assumed name, and we have no idea how many of his facts are just as assumed. It will take a long time to verify or disprove what “Mark” has written. In the meantime, we should be skeptical of the “facts” he claims to present in this book.

Tig, if W had managed to do it, then that would have actually merited a “Mission Accomplished!” banner. Sending troops into Afghanistan was something I supported because the goal was legitimate and it had the backing and cooperation of the rest of the world.