“If the terrorists lose and we’re happy, the terrorists have won. Brilliant!,” James Taranto quips.
While Taranto’s Best of the Web column doesn’t often dwell on meteorological events, he notes today that there’s a smug cloud over Salon’s Website. Personally, I blame Osama’s last pet cause before assuming room temperature, global warming:
Too Good to Be Happy
In his address last night, President Obama evoked “the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11.” It’s hard to blame him: A president whose policies have been divisively ideological had accomplished something everyone could celebrate. Well, not everyone. Over at Salon, they’re not happy, and they want you to know it’s because they’re better than you.David Sirota scolds Americans for not responding with “somber relief”:
Instead, the Washington press corps–helped by a wild-eyed throng outside the White House–insisted that unbridled euphoria is the appropriate response. And in this we see bin Laden’s more enduring victory–a victory that will unfortunately last far beyond his passing.
For decades, we have held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. . . . But in the years since 9/11, we have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys.
Sirota has unwittingly done a public service here. He has killed off the worst post-9/11 cliché by reducing it to complete absurdity: If the terrorists lose and we’re happy, the terrorists have won. Brilliant!
Taranto’s column today is titled, “Viva Guantanamo –The much-maligned interrogators helped dispatch bin Laden.” That’s not going to lighten the spirits of the folks who blog at Salon, either — but then again, what would?
Stacy McCain rounds up much more left-wing melancholia here, along with a few exceptions:
Barbara Walters: “I would hate now to be a Republican candidate thinking of running.” Joy Behar: “Skip the next election.” See, I can appreciate that: Liberals engaging in partisan cheerleading is actually normal. What is abnormal, and perhaps even pathological, is the handwringing concern about “scapegoating” bin Laden and the guilt-stricken fear that jubilant chants of “USA! USA!” are excessively “bellicose.”
Meanwhile, Instapundit rounds up reaction from conservatives, including a commenter at Protein Wisdom who drolly remarks: “A Nobel peace prize winner carrying out a successful assassination!” And Insty also enjoys the irony that the information which led to this success came from “enhanced interrogation” of Guantanamo detainees: “I’m gobsmacked! But the original gobsmackee, Andrew Sullivan, is now celebrating Obama’s martial might. You go, guy. Glad you’ve found another warlike President you can love.”
If Sully is tied into a knot of hopeless and inexplicable contradictions, this is another reason to cheer: “USA! USA! USA!”
Heh. Maybe this is what Andrew was referring to back in 2009 when he dubbed Obama — as he did with Kerry five years earlier — a conservative politician.
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