Obama will enjoy a few weeks of better approval ratings, but when the dust settles down, and people realize that bin Laden was a toothless wild boar at the time of his death, we will see more and more of a backlash against Obama as he continues to stumble and fall on both domestic and foreign policy. In addition, it is already known that Obama just had a bit of beginner’s luck and that Bush was the one who did the real work by ensuring that the scum captured in Afghanistan would spill the beans.

For starters, the commentator missed the one genuine error in the Brennan press conference: the use of the double superlative, “most gutsiest”, as quoted in the fourth-to-last paragraph.

In paragraphs 2 – 4, the writer unsuccessfully attempts to compare the tension in the White House with the bravery of the troops carrying out the mission. Of course there is a difference in the risks that the military and civilian planners, commanders (including the commander-in-chief) and intelligence personnel not in combat are taking compared to the troops in the line of fire, but that overlooks the tension of responsible commanders who genuinely care about the lives of the troops they have put at risk for the mission for which the commanders are responsible. It would appear that this White House takes its responsibilities very seriously.

So seriously, in fact, that the President, as his predecessors of both parties did, attended a previously scheduled perennial joke-fest and, notwithstanding the pressing matters of state that were surely on his mind, joked like nothing important was happening, thereby keeping secret the extraordinary mission that was pending. To cancel his attendance at the joke-fest may have tipped off foreign intelligence, or the rocket scientists at the LA Times, that something serious was afoot.

As for the author’s speculation that torture produced the intelligence that enabled this mission: (a) that has not been estblished yet, as far as I know; (b) torture remains illegal, even when it works, and degrading to the government that does it, as much when it works as when it doesn’t, which is usually the case; and (c) if the previous administration had the information 4 years ago, why oould nothing be accomplished with the information until a change of administrations? Of course there are plausible explanations for why the previous administration could not do in 8 years what the current administration did in 2, but those reasons will have to await a factual evaluation by honest journalists and scholars, not the spur-of-the-moment spins of a hack who calls the planners and commanders of this remarkable mission “beaucratic bastards.”