The Death of Bin Laden

As the world knows, Osama Bin Laden was supposedly killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan last Sunday.  I found out about this when I was working.  Someone happened to initially misspeak (or was it a Freudian slip?) when she told us that "Obama was shot."  We were like "what", and she quickly corrected herself to say that "Osama was shot".  Everyone was very happy and uber-patriotic, saying things like "don't fuck with us", shit like that.  I kept my feelings to myself; in that crowd, if you say the wrong thing, you might find yourself hanging by your testicles. 

Anyway, although I have no solid belief system or empirical evidence to back it up (other than what I read on the net), I think Osama has been dead for awhile, possibly years.  The video releases of him have simply been too erratic and disjointed for me to believe that it was anything other than an orchestrated hoax.  I also factor in that he had kidney disease, and had a silly time envisioning him evading hordes of U.S. troops in the mountains of Afghan/Pakistan with his dialysis machine and his followers.  We've had a powerful interest in keeping him "alive" to serve as an Emmanuel Goldstein type of nemesis (read Orwell's 1984 if you don't understand that reference).  Putting a face to the war on terror was the only way Washington was going to get the support of a majority of Americans. 

So, assuming that I'm right (and who knows), deciding to "kill" Osama now, to play that card, must mean that things are afoot, and that we need a big distraction, something to placate us.  I have several theories.  One is that as the rising gas prices undermine what economic "recovery" there is (and which will ultimately kill it), Obama needed something that would buy him some time and appease the public.  I think killing Osama would certainly be one thing he could give us.  Another thing is that Obama needed a victory, in a big way, politically.  I think that he might have seen Donald Trump as a viable threat going forward.  So, between releasing his long-form birth certificate and putting Osama's head on the wall, he has marginalized Trump and has gotten a head start towards winning re-election; although, if the economy continues to tank, people might have awfully short memories.  Yet another theory is that the shit is about to hit us in a really big way (peak oil, rising food prices, tanking economy, etc.) and our government is trying to paper these over with stories like Bin Laden getting killed. 

I didn't watch much of the news footage concerning Bin Laden's death, but the masses seemed to be thrilled.  Why?  Yeah, it looks like we got him, but at what cost?  Starting two wars, hundreds of thousands dead, a bankrupt empire (that being us, BTW).  We could have probably easily gotten him and his cohorts by pursuing a "Munich" type strategy.  What we did was basically the equalvant of killing an ant with a flamethrower.