Keith assesses the impact of the death of Osama bin Laden in a special comment.
The Fok News DKOS Group publishes a diary summary of Keith's opinion blog Fok News.
He begins with a national security assessment. Bin Laden's death will not disrupt the terror planning operations and he may be more valuable to their cause as a martyr than a target. Al Quada is not built for quick response. There may be meticulous plans in the pipeline but the most probable terrorist retaliation within our borders will probably be hurried and amateurish.
the greatest threat right now is from individuals not directly connected to Al Quada, out of rage, frustration, and the accurate sense that their evil inspiration is now dead, acting alone with what ever they might have. It is simultaneously disturbing and reassuring to remember however that these kinds of individuals could be set off by anthing.. anything from bin Laden's death to bad weather. Their threat level may not grow very much at all.
Keth predicts that there will "certainly be no groundswell in the Middle East, rising up to avenge their supposed leader". Aside from elements in Pakistan and the Taliban, " there is not a government in the region that is not happy he's dead. He was their enemy as much as he was ours".
And curious is it not when the uprisings of 2011 unfolded how those who rose up against repressive governments in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen.... Not only did not of those who sought change invoke bin Laden or Al Quada, as symbols or inspritations, but the fact that they ignored a terror group that sought to overthrow these very same governments., was not even part of the public discussion... there or here. Nobody even questioned why those rightly seeking to derange the power structure of the Mid East did not turn to bin Laden. And that will be be answer to the proverbial question, What will be the reaction on the Arab street?
The largest international impact will be upon our involvement in Afghanistan.
Support for the Afghanistan War here will probably vanish in the weeks and months to come. President Obama could easily accelerate withdrawal and get nothing but praise from most of the nation. "
And now we come to the least important and the most fascinating impact of the raid at Abbottabad... It's rearrangement of the political landscape of this country. From the date that the Republicans politicized 9-11 by running ads of Georgia Senator Max Cleeland with Osama bin Laden in the same picture. The symbol of the Republican Party might as well have not been an elephant, but bin Laden himself. Everything that happened or everything that didn't happen was perverted into a symbol of Republican mastery and of Democratic weakness and even of Democratic treachery. Five separate national Republican political campaigns were run on a simple premise, Vote Democratic And You Die! Cleeland was only the first to be smeared in 2002. The Swiftboaters turned John Kerry's military experience into a liability in 2004. and the Gop boasted that a bin Laden tape released just days before the vote turned the election to President Bush. The 2006 mid terms were run on the GOP premise that" Bush had kept us safe", conveniently ignoring that it was on his watch that the nightmare of 9-11 unfolded.
2008 brought this divisive sick strategy to it's apex..The claim that a candidate for the presidency was not actually American- that he was a terrorist sympathizer.
2010 saw invocations of how that President has failed to protect America.
The political careers of the GOP terror stokers is over. Bachman, Palin, Guiliani, Gingrich, Peter King and his terror hearings in the House are all collapsing like a house of cards.
Keith concludes
there is only one oversimplification now that matters any more. Barack Obama got Osama bin Laden. And every other political calculation, every strategy that suggests Democratic weakness or liberal uncertainty, or an Obama halfhearted in the the defense of this nation is of an instant GONE.
These arguments are worse than laughable, worse than stupid, worse than bankrupt, these arguments are today as dead as bin Laden.
A perceptive and devastating obituary for a long running program of Republican terrorism that has shaped our political landscape since the sirens of 9-11. The long nightmare is ending.