Where’s the Punch Line, Mister President?

 

By: Jeff Katz -May, 2011

 

Yesterday was a big television day for me. I came home after slaving over a hot microphone for four straight hours, made some lunch and joined my lovely bride on the couch.

We had TV to watch and nothing was going to stop us. First up, Showtime on Demand for Nurse Jackie. Great show with Edie Falco and a wonderful supporting cast. Sort of a dark comedy. Then it was laugh out loud with Modern Family. Ed O’Neill who played Al Bundy so many years ago is still a tremendous comedic actor and the cast of characters surrounding him is one of the strongest on tv today. I started to eye the clock and I realized I still had about an hour before I needed to walk down to school and pick up my sons. I had no more excuses at this point, so I turned to FOX News and watched the appearance of the Chosen One at Ground Zero. No, there’s nothing funny about that scene.

Just a few days earlier, we had received the news that after ten years on the run, Osama bin Laden had been put down like the rabid dog he was. President Obama delivered a late night address to the nation wherein he announced the killing of bin Laden and more than anything else took credit, on a personal level, for the action. What a shock it must have been to the heroic members of Seal Team Six to hear the pretender in chief use the words “I”, “me” and “my” more than any others while talking about bin Laden’s killing. Some of the SEALs probably started looking around to see how they could have possibly missed Obama in his BDUs with the bowie knife clenched in his teeth. Really, from the sounds of the Obama speech you would have believed that he was at the controls of one of the choppers that entered Pakistan under cover of night.

Nobody can deny that some of the credit for taking down bin Laden lies with the current occupant of the Oval Office. But honesty demands that the narrative also point out that it was President George W. Bush and his team who paved the way for the mission. It was the relentless pursuit of actionable intelligence by the CIA at their various locales around the world, and the activities of military agents at Gitmo, which resulted in the scraps of info which was ultimately used to track down and kill public enemy number one. Obama and his leftwing minions have consistently claimed that every ill in the country has been “inherited from the previous administration”. Well, so too was the actionable intelligence “inherited from the previous administration.”

I was happy to learn that bin Laden was pronounced dead but I was saddened to see Obama lecture the nation yet again about his claimed moral superiority. He refused to show photos of the dead bin Laden because he somehow knows best for us. He claimed that showing a photo of OBL would be akin to taking a victory lap or spiking the football. Of course, Obama’s performance at Ground Zero was exactly that. No, he did not take a victory lap for America rather he turned what should have been a solemn and somber event into just another campaign stop on his hopeless and small change 2012 tour. Like everything else with this guy, it was all about him. He spiked the football and took a victory lap all the while chanting his own name. How very sad it was. At least the fictional characters on Nurse Jackie and Modern Family provide some much needed comic relief and relaxation. Sadly, this latest season of The West Wing continues to show that the junior varsity players really are in charge.

Oh, one final thought. The Dalai Bama went to great pains to point out that bin Laden was provided with appropriate Muslim funeral rites. So sorry to hear that. I had hoped that bin Laden would have been wrapped in bacon strips, covered in shoes and pulled by a dog sled, but our guys were working on a very tight schedule. And those seventy two virgins bin Laden was expecting? Turns out that he was actually met by twenty four Virginians…the true heroes of Seal Team Six!