Osama Bin Laden Dead!

My first thought was "Burn in Hell, motherfucker!".

On reflection, I have some other thoughts.

First, stories coming out describing how we found this Bin Laden indicate that information obtained from interrogations of GitMo inmates was a critical starting point, particularly those of Kahlid Sheik Mohammad.  It seems that President G.W. Bush is entirely vindicated in establishing this prison.

Second, Bin Laden was not hiding in some cave in the Hindu Kush Mountains, but living in a custom-built mansion withing easy driving distance of Islamabad,  the capitol of Pakistan!  I would hate to be the President of Pakistan on the phone to President Obama, explaining how the Pakistani government cannot control its own intelligence agency, the ISI.

Third, how many days will pass until Arab street protesters burn President Obama in effigy?

The Case for Profiling

In the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, we see the bankruptcy of our airline security system in this country. In this RCP story we learn that our system focused on the wrong thing:

As Bob Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, recently wrote, this failure reflects the flawed thinking of aviation security policy, namely a fixation "on keeping bad things -- as opposed to bad people -- off of airplanes."

It is an unavoidable fact that these "bad people" tend to come from certain places and subscribe to a certain religious affiliation. Focus on them.

And in the case of the bomber, this was certainly true: young Muslim man, recently in Yemen, paid cash for a one-way ticket, no luggage checked in for his international flight. These should have immediately indicated that the bomber be screened further.

Some people would call this "racial profiling", and object on moral grounds. I would call it common sense. The people attacking us are not Lutherans, but Muslims, and we need to face up to the fact that while not all Muslims are terrorists, every terrorist that we have captured or encountered in the last 20 years has been a Muslim.

Political correctness on this issue is going to kill a lot of Americans.

Armed Citizens Against Terrorism

I have had one nagging thought ever since I got over the sheer awfulness of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D. C.: why have we not seen the type of suicide bombings that Isreal suffered, or the type of terrorist attack inflicted on Mumbai last year?

It turns out that someone is thinking about it, and possible counter strategies, as described in this New York Times article .

But my reaction to this article is that they may be over looking a potential resource: armed citizens. Does anyone think that terrorists could shoot up Dallas, Texas, with the same impunity that they had in Mumbai? I have faith that not only would are police shoot back, but some of our concealed weapon permit holders would as well.

Perhaps, as in Isreal, we should encourage more citizens to go about their daily business armed.