Pierce writes: "15 percent of registered Republicans in Ohio think Willard Romney deserves more credit for killing Osama bin Laden than does the president. Another 47 percent aren't really sure who does. In North Carolina, 29 percent of them give the credit to Romney while a whopping 56 percent of them find it too difficult to answer the question of whether the credit should go to the guy who actually gave the order, or to the guy who forgot to mention the troops in his acceptance speech not long ago."
New polls show some people think Mitt Romney deserves more credit than President Obama for the death of Osama bin Laden. (photo: Getty Images)
11 September 12
ccording to the good folks at Public Policy Polling - and why they asked this question, I never will know - 15 percent of registered Republicans in Ohio think Willard Romney deserves more credit for killing Osama bin Laden than does the president. Another 47 percent aren't really sure who does. In North Carolina, 29 percent of them give the credit to Romney while a whopping 56 percent of them find it too difficult to answer the question of whether the credit should go to the guy who actually gave the order, or to the guy who forgot to mention the troops in his acceptance speech not long ago.
Happy 9/11, America!
If we needed any more evidence that the atrocities perpetrated by Osama bin Laden 11 years ago have been transformed into simply another mudball in our national political mudfight, that poll pretty much seals the deal for you. It's more than ignorance. It's more than being misinformed. (I don't know of a single commentator, not even the wingiest of wingnut public-access trolls, who's credited Romney with being involved in the raid into Pakistan.) This is simple reflexive tribalism - Democrat bad, Republican, good. Also, too.
The fact is that we never have found a way to integrate the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans into our politics in a way that satisfies all of us and does honor to the victims of that day. And the responsibility for that does lie with a Republican - namely, George W. Bush, whose negligence, as Kurt Eichenwald in The New York Times reminds us today, prior to the attack remains inexcusable, and who later used the horror of those events, and the ensuing spasm of national mourning and unity, to embark on a whole raft of policies, including an illegal war in Iraq. The Democratic leadership in the Congress, by and large, went along with these policies until everything went sour in Baghdad, and then they spent an election-cycle-and-a-half trying to climb out of the mess in which they were utterly complicit. (Both John Kerry and Joe Biden gave rousing assaults on Romney's foreign-policy views last week in Charlotte. Both of them also voted for the most singularly stupid foreign-policy adventure of the past 60 years. Just sayin'.) Now, Democrats defend a president who, while he has extricated American combat troops from Iraq, also has continued - and, in many cases, amplified and legitimized - many of the national-security policies put in place by his bungling predecessor, and a great number of Democrats use the killing of bin Laden to justify that support in the same reflexive way that Republicans used the 9/11 attacks as justification for the Patriot Act and shock-and-awe.
(Let us be clear. I find liberal handwringing about the killing of bin Laden embarrassing. The man was responsible for at least three acts of war against the United States that we know of, one of which killed thousands of people at the time and is still killing people with diseases they contracted while sifting through the rubble of his greatest triumph. He also was responsible for acts of war against Kenya and against Tanzania, when he arranged the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies on their soil. He was not an agent of liberation. He was not fighting to free his people, or to repel an occupying power, no matter what he thought of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He was not Ho Chi Minh or Michael Collins. He was a quasi-cultish theocratic sociopath with enough money to arrange mass murder - a multi-millionnaire Charlie Manson. He committed acts of war and he was killed in an act of war. Two tie, all tie. Enough, already. The drone strikes, alas, are another matter entirely.)
If we are to have a consensus, if we are to keep September 11 from being an annual exercise in marinating ourselves in distant grief and tinhorn jingoism, we have to act in our politics as though we learned something from it more profound than "the oceans couldn't protect us." (This is no great insight. The Aztecs figured that one out as soon as Cortez was done with them.) We should become better informed than we are. We should become more wary and more skeptical of government policies that are sold as pigs-in-a-poke for our own protection. We should become more wary of what happens when you put a democracy on automatic pilot. To make the annual observance of these crimes mean more than endless tick-tock specials on the History Channel, we should commit ourselves to more active and more informed citizenship. We should insist on transparency. We should make sure our presidents do their homework. We should commit to knowing what we're talking about.
Charlie has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently "Idiot America." He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.
