Thank You, Mr. President; Three Cheers for Our Navy Seals

Hail to our chief, for having quietly, without fanfare or premature announcement, acted behind the scenes to gather the intelligence to locate bin Laden.  I'm sure the temptation to enhance his fluctuating approval ratings was at times great.

These events are reminiscent for me to the deliberate pace with which Obama dealt with the Somali pirate hostage crisis, where he similarly used a precision force to achieve his goals, rather than a more crude approach.

Obama could have taken the safer but less beneficial route of bombing the compound to a crater in the ground.  The risks would have been different - more civilians at risk with a miss for example, but possibly less danger to our armed forces.  I think Obama made an excellent decision in seeking to recover bin Laden's body.  There is a tremendous message in taking his corpse out of that compound along with the intelligence material.

Our embassies are on heightened alert, in anticipation of a retaliatory strike.  One will occur somewhere, at least an attempt.  We too often forget how very frequently these attempts fail.  But someone will try; no doubt, more than one.

My assessment of the news is that this event is a serious push-back against Al Quaida, that those attempts will be more subdued by Obama having taken this route rather than other ways of attacking and killing bin Laden. I have no doubt the crazy Muslim fundies are angry; fundamentalists tend to be excessive, and crazy rather than moderate.  By definition they tend to want to impose their 'right way of thinking and believing' on others; look at those who are trying to do so in this country.  The pattern is the same, only the superficial details vary. We see the same attempts at a repressive, restrictive theocracy by our own authoritarian right.  Those who see themselves as pure and purists fear progress, fear modernity.  They want to turn the clock backwards to a time they believe was better; a time which never existed as they perceive it.

Obama has taken another step, scored another victory, for moderate, secular democracy with the killing of bin Laden.  It will ripple, both positively and negatively, across the parts of the world the Muslim faith is dominant. The positive ripples will be in the encouragement to the middle eastern popular uprisings against old-time dictators, the ones on whom we had been relying far too much for rendition and intelligence against terrorists.

Winning doesn't look like Charlie Sheen; this - THIS - is what winning looks like!

A post-script of sorts: I have to admit that I'm very much hoping that we will have some kind of follow up from this that identifies how bin Laden was able to get the money into Pakistan to build a compound of this size, right under the noses of the Pakistanis. There better be some seroius forensic money tracking. The fact that Obama did not apaprently share this intelleigence or his attack plan with the Pakistanis OR the Afghanis is instructional in what we do next and how we proceed in the region. We would be wise not to waste too much time and energy on our victory celebration; there is clearly a lot more work to be done.

I have every confidence that Obama can and will do that work, quietly, deliberately, and intelligently.  UNLIKE the hawks on the right, who talk loudly, and belligerantly, and with far less subtle intelligence directing their words and ideas. The last thing we need is simplistic ideology driven bull shit like the insanity and stupidity that involved us in Iraq, and dragged on Afghanistan for a decade.