'Ware Nemesis, Obama

Courtesy of the Dish, a tweet from Jeffrey Goldberg in immediate reaction to Joe Biden's Convention paeaen to Barack Obama, Osama-killer:

@JeffreyGoldberg I've been told I'm a bloodthirsty warmongering neoconservative, but for whatever reason, I just don't like all this bragging about killing. 6:51 PM - 6 Sep 12

For the record, I was on the same page. Below, excerpts from that section of Biden's speech, and my immediate reactions on Twitter.

Barack understood that the search for bin Laden was about a lot more than taking a monstrous leader off the battlefield. It was about righting an unspeakable wrong, healing a nearly unbearable wound in America's heart ..

When [Romney] was asked about bin Laden in 2007, he said, and I quote, "it's not worth moving heaven and earth, and spending billions of dollars, just trying to catch one person."

He was wrong. If you understood that America's heart had to be healed, you would have done exactly what the President did. And you too would have moved heaven and earth--to hunt down bin Laden, and bring him to justice.

‏@xpostfactoid1 Revenge is about righting an unspeakable wrong? Healing? Unseemly. #DNC12 p.s. Chanting is worse  6:49 PM - 6 Sep 12 · Details

And because of all the actions he took, because of the calls he made--and because of the grit and determination of American workers--and the unparalled bravery of our special forces--we can now proudly say— Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.

@xpostfactoid1 'ware nemesis, crowing over the dead

6:51 PM - 6 Sep 12 · Details

‏@xpostfactoid1 Democrats cheering for blood  

6:53 PM - 6 Sep 12 · Details

 In the same sequence, I also tweeted that Biden was "unbearably full of shit." Watching the video of that section again, I'm not so sure. Biden drinks his own Kool-Aid; I suspect he can simultaneously be utterly sincere and full of shit.  But what I am sure of: I don't like to see an American crowd roaring with triumph over an execution, crowing over a corpse.

I do recognize killing Bin Laden as a legitimate act of war. And also, that on some level, in our politics, the President, having taken responsibility for the deed, must taken credit too, and for the most part I think that Obama personally has done it in the right way. But I think that calling the act a "healing" is sick, and deeming it the "righting of a wrong" is wrong.  

And more broadly, I think that the President's taking actual solo responsibility for many more executions, many of them far more morally and legally dubious than this one, and formalizing a process whereby he alone signs off, may do more harm to our democracy than Bin Laden ever did.

P.S. the Dish post cites a more sweeping denunciation by David Sessions of the values Biden expressed, of our politics generally, and of our military adventures.  I am intrigued by the excerpt and suspect I would agree with much but not all of the full argument, but the link is dead. No, it's not! -- but I must get back to work just now...

Update: do read Sessions:

Worst of all, both are steeped in an ideology—an ironically anti-Christian one, for a nation with so much Christian pablum on its lips—of striving, of earning, of getting what one “deserves,” as if there were any coherent way of measuring such a thing. One party serves this cocktail to a motley assemblage of privileged intellectuals, ethnic minorities, and underclass strugglers; the other delivers it, in a rawer and more potent form, back to the reactionary gentry from whence it came...

...as miserable as it can be to remain engaged, it seems to me to be the only way one can be justified in hoping at all. It’s easy to be all in or all out, but difficult to acknowledge that the Obama administration, as the current incarnation of the American executive branch, is a destructive institution headed by a man who is probably as good as they come. Even if the president’s basic decency is no match for the history and structure of the government he runs, it is impossible to pretend it doesn’t matter at all. Obama vs. Romney is life and death to no small number of Americans, a reality can’t allow myself to discount no matter how slight the improvement might be.

 I am reminded of Ursula Le Guin's fictional anarchist philosopher Odo, spiritual founder of an impossibly successful anarchist society in The Dispossessed:

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

 That is in a sense true. But I don't think a functioning society can be based on that assumption.