Thursday, May 05, 2011

Mr. President, blow the bugle, raise the flag, and show the damn picture.

(WARNING: Mothers - your children might be harmed by not having them view the pictures in this post)You'd think that after finally putting the birther issue to rest, President Obama would try to stay away from saying things which call his status as an American into question... but apparently that's not the case.

Bill Chadwell
Asked about the decision Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Carney said:
"The fact of the matter is, as the president described, these are graphic photographs of someone who was shot in the face -- the head, rather," he said. "It is not in our national security interests to allow those images, as has been in the past been the case, to become icons to rally opinion against the United States. The president's number one priority is the safety and security of American citizens at home and Americans abroad. There is no need to release these photographs to establish Osama bin Laden's identity. And he saw no other compelling reason to release them, given the potential for national security risks. And further, because he believes, as he said so clearly, this is not who we are."
   [Click to Outlaws of the Wild West]
Bill Doolin

Seriously? President Obama decided not to release the death photo of osama bin laden because "this is not who we are"?!

Apparently he and his press secretary are equally ignorant of who America is, and has always been. Actually, quite to the contrary, America has always been just the sort of country that blatantly displays not only the images of outlaws having received justice, but the bodies themselves - that is exactly the type of people who we are and who we have always been.
 
Which explains why so many today are trying to pretend that that is the type of people we are not. The proregressives have been trying for over a century to breed it out of us, trying to namby-pambify our tastes, trying to take the violence out of our stories, take the competition out of our games, and remove the concept of justice from our Justice system. But we have got a long, long history of not only displaying the bodies and pictures of dead outlaws, but even of making a family outings of attending a public hangings, not to mention displaying the bodies of the dead miscreants for all to see - young and old alike.

Bonnie & Clyde's last
   
Bonnie & Clyde

Why?

Not to revel in or gloat in the death of anyone, but because we have always been a nation who knew and believed that the wages of sin, is death, and you don't try to hide that, or give any unwarranted dignity to those who have scoffed at the rule of law and taken the lives of others.
 

 As I said to a friend just the other day, it is not reveling in death to exult when a threat to life is extinguished.


Dalton Gang



  
John Dillenger's death scene
 It is not reveling in death to rejoice when an end has been brought to one who has brought about such horrific physical and emotional carnage as this one, and whose very life was lived for the purpose of causing ever so much more.
 

It is no mere catharsis of the flesh to rejoice when an existential threat is removed, but one of the spirit and an Affirmation of life. I pity those who interpose such contrived calculations between their mind and body, and even worse, consider them ethical positions to take.

But are you any safer than you were last week?” Are you such a utilitarian that only those transactions which produce a measurable value are worth engaging in? Truly, few philosophies offer a more dismal and empty view of life than that of the materialists.
Harvey Logan, aka Curry

George West Musgrave


Justice done is a value in and of itself, and ridiculing or minimizing it is the most childish and cowardly action of all – a flight from the responsibilities of living.


John Dillenger
 You kill the outlaw, and you put on display how ugly, how unglorious, unromantic and meaningless they allowed their lives to become; you do your very best to extract some measure of value from their wasted and worthless life by enabling a lesson to be learned from their deaths.

If you want to do Justice, then your first task is to unwaveringly look at things as they are. It is your responsibility to honestly and deliberately identify the facts and nature of the situation you face, and judge, and act, accordingly. You must look squarely at what you’ve determined that you must do, and at the consequences of your actions. You don’t’ brush anything aside, you don’t look away from what you must face or their consequences, you face up to them and take responsibility for them, and learn from them. And you should know that attempting to avoid the responsibilities of your actions in a misbegotten attempt to shield others, is only going to deprive them of what they should have known, and weaken the strength of what you thought you knew, prior to your turning away from it.
 
So, sorry Mr. President, but that is exactly who we are as Americans.

I have no reason whatsoever to doubt that osama bin laden was killed by our military, and killed nearly next door to the home of Pockeestan's military, and I for one am glad of it.
 
Horse theif
 Mr. President, be an American. Show the picture.

We are not a people who cower with concern over what the reaction of those who hate us will be. Do you want to know how to inflame the sensibilities of the islambies? Show even more concern for their sensibilities. That is how you inflame an aggressor, encourage a bully and invite violence - show concern for, and respect for their sensibilities.


Baby Faced Nelson


John Wesley Hardin
 Mr. President, that is the kind of people who we are not. Very few people in your administration, and very few in the previous administration, seem to understand that.

The Tea Party explosion was, and is, not due to financial considerations or high taxes, it is due to our realizing that our government doesn't have any clue or regard for who the American people actually are, and are too intent on making us into some alien people which proregressives on the left, and the right, have long been so intent on reforming us into being.

We aren't interested. That's not the sort of people we are.

You want to know what other kind of people we also are not? We are also not the sort of people who lower their flag in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of those seeking to kill us. According to Richard Miniter’s 'MASTERMIND': .
"More than that, though, Miniter’s book includes shocking new disclosures about how the US treats its detainees. Miniter tells Big Peace:

I was stunned to learn while researching Mastermind that Guantanamo detainees succeeded in convincing prison officials to no longer raise the American flag anywhere they could see it. Each morning on every U.S. military base around the world, the American flag is raised to a bugle. But in the interests of not offending the detainees, it was stopped at Guantanamo.."
Mr. President, blow the bugle, raise the flag, and show the damn picture.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I am glad the days of public hangings in the town square are over. But I grew up daily reading the Time-Life Old West books. I still have the set of them somewhere and I remember looking at all the dead outlaw pictures. I turned out okay. People die and in some cases the corpse needs to be seen. But I also think that the news should cover it when the coffins come home from our overseas wars. They used to and we need to return to that. Both to show respect and to show the sacrifices that the military makes for our freedoms.

Van Harvey said...

Lance said "I am glad the days of public hangings in the town square are over"

On the surface I agree, I mean I really can't imagine someone wanting to see an execution, wanting to in the way some people want to see 'survivor', and I especially can't see wanting to expose your kids to that.

But I've been beginning to think that such things may fall under the burdensome and necessary costs of a maintaining a healthy society. That people should not seek to escape from the consequences and responsibilities of Justice, that they should recall that Justice, that in order to "...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...", that we must recognize that there is a price to be paid to reality by all of us, and that even simply seeking to evade that responsibility breeds corruption. It's not enough to theoretically recognize that bad things happen to evil doers, but maybe we need to viscerally recognize that doing what is right is itself all too often an awful task to bring about.

Do we do any of us a favor, when we allow people to ignore that?

And isn't our entire penal system based upon the idea of removing uncomfortable situations and people from our awareness? Introducing an easy separation between the criminal and their victims? Does such a separation enable or retard a true sense of remorse on the part of the criminal?

How's that been working out? It began with Jeremy Bentham (right along with Individual Rights being thought of as 'nonsense on stilts') materialist ic utilitarian idea that people can be sparred internal discomfort and be 'fixed' by society (who is really responsible for their 'crimes') by means of changing peoples environment in order to alter their behavior.

How has that worked out?
(annoying blogger size break)

Van Harvey said...

(cont)

Those who commit crimes today are highly unlikely to give any thought to having to put right the wrongs they've committed, and remorse isn’t enough, they rarely need to worry about their actions requiring them to provide restitution, and they should have to - imagine if they had to labor to repay their victims, even with their own lives - mightn't that be something they'd learn from? But as it is today, as a result of the system which replaced that sort of thinking, we send them far away, lock them into cells with others of equal or even more polluted minds, let them stew on their 'misfortune' and then release them amongst us.

Criminals know that there will either be no consequences, or those consequences will have little or not relation to the crimes they committed and their own lives will have to bear have little or no effort or care or need to face up to what they did - instead they will face no need but to develop the necessary 'hardness' to survive for some time amongst other prisoners.

Justice is not rendered, but injustice is propagated.

And I'm beginning to think that that process needs to begin with each person in society being intimately familiar with the awful consequences of injustice and justice.

"But I also think that the news should cover it when the coffins come home from our overseas wars."

The manner and context would matter greatly. Any form or manner that made it possible to be trivialized, made a casual matter, I think I'm probably deeply opposed to. T.V. News, a picture and table graph in the newspaper. Nope.

Could and should the public be enabled to enter into an atmosphere of gravity and respect before the returning coffins? Perhaps. Should that be the 'politically correct' expectation which everyone feels and socially fears breaching? Definitely. How would such a thing be accomplished? I'm afraid I've no idea.

"Both to show respect and to show the sacrifices that the military makes for our freedoms."

Yes.

Anonymous said...

The reason why they did public hangings in the old days was because they did not have time for BS, and it was a clear deturent to crime. You would attend a public execution and observe how gruesome it is and think " wow i would not want to be them". and if you were a child, it made a very strong impression on you. children were used to seeing such things, and they were not damaged because of it. It seems harsh now to hang someone for stealing a horse " let the punishment fit the crime" of course! but UBL was a murderer, he deserved to be executed, and valiantly was by our wonderful armed forces. show the picture!