Monday, May 2, 2011

Anticipating the inevitable spin ...

We've seen enough from the fringe (fascist clown @JoeWMiller, for instance) to indicate, I think, that the killing of Osama bin Laden will be just another event to be spun into an attack on Obama. Here are some of the tactics they'll use, and the obvious counters:

"OK, you got him, but ... "


"We had the information in August but didn't act on it until now? Why not more direct action, why did it take so long?"
One implication they'll be driving at with this line is that Obama wavers, over-thinks, and can't bring himself to act directly, with courage, like W. would have given the same intel. The other is that there was politically motivated timing to the attack on the compound, that Obama sinisterly and cynically waited until it suited him to distract people from the deficit and to give him a needed bump in the polls. The key thing in responding to these attacks is to address as what they are, partisan hackery. If this had been for timing, would the President have waited until 11pm on a Sunday night to make the announcement, before there's even a GOP challenger to use it against? There was no political advantage to announcing it this way.

"How do we know it's really him? Where's the DNA evidence? OMG they buried the body at sea it's a cover up!!!"
Luckily, conservatives have already played the conspiracy card and had it blow up in their faces: long form birth certificate. The "... I was busy catching Osama bin Laden." meme is great in-your-face reply to this line of attack.

"Osama didn't matter any more. We have bigger problems. This is irrelevant."
Tell that to the people who gathered at the White House and at the WTC last night. See how far that gets you. The thing with this one is we really do have bigger problems -- not the deficit or the debt ceiling -- we are still fighting wars we can't win in at least two countries and unemployment is unacceptably high. Killing Osama didn't bring a single one of his victims back to life, it didn't bring any of our dead soldiers back to life, it doesn't result in new jobs for out of work people. If feels good to have a bad guy out of commission, but I don't know what else it does.

One last note, I chuckled mirthlessly last night when the President recited from the Pledge of Allegiance and included "under God" between "One nation," and "indivisible."  It must have pissed Michele Bachmann off that he didn't leave the door open for her to continue her harping on his insufficient use of the word "God" every time he speaks anywhere, about anything. He jammed a bunch of God references in at the end there, to ram home the point, I suppose, that God approves of killing your enemies.

Update: tristero at Hullabaloo offers a few more tactics we're sure to see that I didn't mention ...
2. Outrage that Obama "hogged all the credit" in his speech and failed to thank Bush by name - This will deflect the story away from bin Laden's death and onto the "character" of Obama. Nevermind that Bush failed not only to catch him, but failed to protect us from bin Laden in the first place: they will try to make Obama's "uppitiness" the story (but of course, except maybe in the south, they won't use that word). [Michelle Malkin started working this angle last night. - cdogzilla]

3. From now on, any attack on the US that succeeds will be blamed on Obama for somehow "botching" the killing the of Bin Laden, or the disposal of his body ...
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