Just to update a few stories:
Last week I wrote about serial liar John Brennan, U.S. deputy national security advisor, whose fabulous account of the Navy SEALs raid on Osama’s compound proved to be not only fabulous but fabricated. President Obama and others hastened to add “context,” which, as Slate scribe William Saletan ably explains here, is pretty far wide of the mark as well.
Once you get past all the chest-thumping, what you get is this: The raid was a gamble, that proved to be a huge success, but 1) despite what the president and others would have you believe, the odds were very good that the compound was Osama’s (that part was not a gamble), 2) despite what the president and others would have you believe, there was no real firefight, 3) despite what the president and others would have you believe, Osama was basically assassinated, that is to say, shot down in cold blood (ugly, but I think the right thing to do), and 4) despite what the president and others would have you believe, intelligence-gathering was an integral part of the mission.
Saletan sums as follows:
“So the intelligence harvest was more central, and the raid was less of a gamble, than the U.S. pretends. There’s no shame in this revised narrative. And it makes much more sense than the official story does. Everything Obama has done in office reeks of rationality, pragmatism, and prudence. It’s what has made him a good president. It’s why he insisted that the raid be designed with safeguards and backups, including—if the revised narrative is correct—a second, nerdier objective in case the first one evaporated.
An instinctive, all-or-nothing roll of the dice on a kill shot would have been sexier. It certainly makes a better story. But it doesn’t fit Obama. And it doesn’t fit the facts.”
This week I wrote about the silence of the Washington Post on the Tony Kushner/CUNY fracas in the Big Apple. Since I last wrote 1) CUNY has decided to grant Kushner the honorary degree after all, and 2) there’s a lot of talk about getting rid of Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, the CUNY trustee who asked the trustees to vote against giving the degree to Kushner. I don’t think Wiesenfeld should be dumped, since it was the CUNY board as a whole that made it happen, but it is an interesting and important story. Except that Post doesn’t think so. It hasn’t even bothered to tell its readers that Kushner’s getting the degree after all.
The cream of the jest, or at least one of them, is that back in the Post’s liberal days, they were all over Tony Kushner, giving rave reviews to a Kennedy Center production of Angels in America, which prompted some sour Post readers to complain that they were suckered into paying near-Broadway prices for four hours of gay sit-com kitsch. Yeah, those were the days!
