Cement.

I'm slogging through the NYT material about these last days of the Biden presidency. The word "cement" keeps appearing:

1. "Biden Races to Cement His Legacy Through a Series of Actions" — "In the final days of his term, President Biden has issued a series of policy decisions intended to cement his agenda and, in some cases, make it harder for President-elect Donald J. Trump to put in place his own. The 11th-hour decisions, many of them executive actions, include measures on environmental justice, prison reform, immigration and foreign relations. Some are intended to preserve Mr. Biden’s legacy, while others are last-ditch efforts to expand his approach. Many are likely to be undone after Mr. Trump takes office next week. The actions have gotten the attention of Mr. Trump, who said on social media earlier this month that Mr. Biden was 'doing everything possible' to make the transition process 'as difficult as possible.' 'Fear not, these "orders" will be terminated shortly,' Mr. Trump added."

2. "Biden to Deliver Farewell Address, Capping a 5-Decade Political Career/The president has sought to portray his administration as transformative, but his speech on Wednesday night comes amid a backdrop in which he is not leaving on his own terms" — "The White House would not disclose what Mr. Biden plans to say in his speech, set for 8 p.m. Eastern. But in his final months he has been seeking to cement a legacy as a transformative president that stabilized domestic politics while bolstering America’s leadership abroad, one who ushered the nation out of a pandemic, made historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy, and worked to strengthen democratic institutions both nationally and globally."

If you were really transformative, you would have a legacy because the people saw what you did and lived through your era and were genuinely changed. You wouldn't need to cement anything. You wouldn't need to set up obstacles to try to slow down your successor.

Now, here's an appearance of cement in something from last week about Jimmy Carter: "A Legacy From Carter That Democrats Would Prefer to Escape/For decades, Republicans have reveled in invoking Jimmy Carter’s name to deride Democrats as weak — mockery that has influenced the way Democrats present themselves to voters":

"What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis."

Said Sacha Baron Cohen, quoted in "Jewish Celebrities and Influencers Confront TikTok Executives in Private Call/TikTok faces escalating accusations that it promotes pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel content. 'Shame on you,' Sacha Baron Cohen said on the call" (NYT).

“If you think back to Oct. 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate,” Mr. Cohen said in the meeting. He accused TikTok of feeding similarly incendiary content to young people....

"[A]s a young teenager he was sent, like other children of the global elite, to summer school in Oxford. There he befriended two Spanish girls, went rowing on the Thames..."

"... and visited Stratford-on-Avon. Nonetheless, he found the British 'morally degenerate.' By the age of 16 he was fiercely religious. At 17 he married a 15-year-old cousin.... At the time of his death in 2011, his wives ranged in age from 28 to 62 and his children from 3 to 35. When it came to his family, bin Laden was a man of contradictions. On the one hand, he required his daughters from the age of 3 to be separated from males and insisted that females leave the room when men appeared, even on satellite television. Yet two of his older wives were highly educated, with doctorates in Koranic grammar and child psychology. They helped write his public statements and curate his public image; they engaged in discussions with him on strategy. Bin Laden permitted his second wife to divorce him in 1993, after 10 years of marriage, and his first wife to leave him in 2001. His fifth wife was an ill-educated 16-year-old Yemeni... [H]e told his other wives that she was 30 and highly educated... It appears to have been a happy marriage and the two were in bed together the night of the raid, with two other wives in the bedroom downstairs. Apparently bin Laden was fond of natural aphrodisiacs to help keep his three wives happy while they were all in hiding together. He also used Just for Men hair dye."

From "A Fuller Picture of Osama bin Laden’s Life" a review, in the NYT, of the biography "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden." 

The use of "happy" — boldfaced above — is straight out of the patriarchy handbook: If a man has a woman in bed, she must be happy. If a woman is dosed with a sex drug, it is to make her happy.

As for "man of contradictions," also boldfaced, I suppose bin Laden contained multitudes.

"I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods
I contain multitudes." pic.twitter.com/gBRDHcPXou

— Bob Dylan Page (@Bob41Dylan) April 17, 2020

"MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan argues that we should think of Trump’s followers as if they were al-Qaeda members, who move freely among us because they are white..."

".... The comparison fails even though the mob in the Capitol included at least a few honest-to-goodness, unambiguous terrorists, who came there with the express purpose of violently scaring the hell out of politicians in an effort to change policy...  I once thought resistance to the hysterical style was hopeless.... We overdose on serotonin, or some equally enchanting neurotransmitter, and experience an addict’s bliss at the hysterical scenes that pass before our eyes, whether they make us happy or furious. The only thing that displeases us is boredom—and that is why boredom is our salvation. Developing an aversion to hysteria is a long process—as hard as for a drunk to learn to hate the bottle—but it is possible. You just have to learn to feel disgust for it, and for those who retweet it. I feel my own blood seroconverting against hysteria—I was once entertained, then riled, then bored, and now I am disgusted by it. And that makes me hopeful that others can undergo the same process. One sign that herd immunity against this hysterical style is within reach was the election of Biden, a nonhysterical fogey. More tests will come. A representative from Georgia has vowed to introduce articles of impeachment against Biden the day after the inauguration, for reasons too risible to bear repeating. These non-incidents are good practice: Follow the bead of your attention. Where does it go? Does it slavishly follow the antics of incorrigible exhibitionists? Do you wish it did not?"

From "What to Do With Trumpists/The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene" by Graeme Wood (The Atlantic).

Too risible to link to an article? I looked it up. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said Biden "is willing to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign governments, foreign Chinese energy companies, Ukrainian energy companies." Is willing to abuse...? At least wait until he abuses power. Willingness to abuse power is not enough. 

I can't believe I have to pay attention to a falconer named Parrot.

 Life with Trump is getting a bit surreal...

The bizarre theory, which is outre even by the standards of the right’s usual Benghazi claims, also alleges that Osama Bin Laden’s body-double, rather than the terrorist mastermind himself, was killed in 2011. All those claims come from a falconer who says he uncovered secrets about Al-Qaeda, Iran, and U.S. intelligence in his work as a falconer for Middle Eastern power players. Alan Howell Parrot, the subject of a 2010 documentary about his falconry called Feathered Cocaine, has shot to new fame on the right after a video interview with him played over the weekend at the American Priority Conference, a pro-Trump event held at Trump’s Miami resort. In the video, Parrot, interviewed by conservative personality Nick Noe and the father of a former Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi, makes a series of bizarre claims alleging collusion between Iran, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton ahead of the attack. 

That's from "Trump Touts Falconer’s Benghazi Blood-Sacrifice Conspiracy Theory/Trump’s endorsement of the insane story shot it to national prominence, fueling the bizarre allegations about blood sacrifice and Bin Laden body doubles" at The Daily Beast which I'm reading because I had to go searching for the background to this question — by Savannah Guthrie — from last night's town hall with President Trump: 

"Just this week, you retweeted to your 87 million followers, a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have SEAL Team Six, the Navy SEAL Team Six, killed to cover up the fake death of Bin Laden. Now, why would you send a lie like that to your followers?"

Trump's answer, from the transcript, was: "That was a retweet." That's a retweet! What's the matter, don't you understand retweets?!!

"'It was on brand in the sense that Trump allowed his inner showman to make this a spectacle rather than a solemn moment of acknowledgment and a reflection — the way President Obama did'..."

"... said Ned Price, a CIA officer at the time of bin Laden’s death who later served as a spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama.... Obama spoke of the anguish of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, emphasized the nation’s resolve in recovering, and praised the skill of the intelligence experts who tracked bin Laden down and the courage of the Special Forces who killed him. He also took a measure of credit. 'I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,' said a president who was routinely assailed by Republicans as weak and feckless on foreign affairs. He took no questions from reporters. By contrast, the Trump show on Baghdadi started with a tweet. 'Something very big has just happened!' the president posted on social media Saturday evening, and the White House media office quickly announced that Trump would make a 'major announcement' — 11 hours later at 9 a.m. Sunday. Critics speculated that the president was eager to upstage the Sunday morning political talk shows in a bid to drown out coverage of the House Democrats’ impeachment effort against him...."

From "In creating spectacle around Baghdadi’s death, Trump departs from Obama’s more measured tone on bin Laden" (WaPo).

In so many ways, Trump is not like Obama. But I presume that each man — on the success of a raid that killed a feared terrorist enemy — made a public display that he believed would advance American military interests and his own political interests. Obama chose to be circumspect and conventionally presidential. After hearing Trump, who was vividly emotional, I relistened to Obama's announcement, and I was struck by the restraint — the blandness. There was nothing about how bin Laden looked or acted as he faced his death. Obama seemed to want to inspire confidence that everything was done with precise correctness. Trump seemed to want us to experience the righteous anger and the vengeance and contempt. These are radically different choices from 2 very different men.

Remember that the Obama administration made a point of communicating with the world about the respectful treatment of bin Laden's corpse:

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed... The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.''

And remember that Trump has openly talked about treating the enemy's bodies with outrageous disrespect:

"Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!," he tweeted. That was after "The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!"...

"They were having terrorism problems [in the Philippines], just like we do," Trump said, according to a February 2016 account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

That's quoted in a blog post of mine in August 2017. I commented:

[Trump] thinks its a good idea to let radical Muslim terrorists know we might mess with their dead bodies in a way that he (presumably) thinks they think will wreck their afterlife. He might think that threat will influence the terrorists, but not necessarily. He might just think that he had a cheeky tweet to entertain his fans and confound his MSM antagonists. 

In his writing, Osama bin Laden sounds surprisingly dumb.

The headline, at The Guardian, stresses Bin Laden's ideas, as if perhaps he's some kind of thinker: "Bin Laden's disdain for the west grew in Shakespeare's birthplace, journal shows/CIA released journal as part of 470,000 documents collected from Bin Laden’s house, showing he visited the UK as a teenager and found it to be ‘decadent.’"

I'm drawn in by the Shakespeare connection and interested to see how he articulated his objections to the West, but forget all that. Read how flat and empty this is. This is from a period in his teenage years when he spent 10 weeks in Britain:

“I got the impression that they were a loose people, and my age didn’t allow me to form a complete picture of life there,” he wrote. “We went every Sunday to visit Shakespeare’s house. I was not impressed and I saw that they were a society different from ours and that they were a morally loose society."

"Loose," that's all he's got. He has to repeat it. He says the name Shakespeare, yet he has not one shred of interest in who Shakespeare was and why he is so important to the people of the West.

Perhaps he was sent to Britain by others and resisted learning anything, but he comes across as an incurious dummy.

Trump has us studying General Pershing.

"Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!," he tweeted. That was after "The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help. Be tough & strong, we love you!"

That's not making an assertion about what General Pershing did, just telling us to go study something. Is that really enough to get a "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact?

Politifact merges the new tweet with something Trump said back in February 2016:

"They were having terrorism problems [in the Philippines], just like we do," Trump said, according to a February 2016 account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

Is that story true? How would we know? If it were true, it might be denied, and if it were false, it might be claimed.

The best evidence U.S. troops used pigs as a tactic against Muslims comes from a memoir by Pershing titled My Life Before the World War, 1860-1917, which was republished in 2013 by the University Press of Kentucky. In the memoir, Pershing writes that another commanding officer in the Philippines, Col. Frank West, had in at least one case seen to it that bodies of Muslim insurgents "were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would-be assassins."

In a footnote, the editor of the 2013 edition, John T. Greenwood, cited a letter about the incident from Maj. Gen. J. Franklin Bell, the commander of the Philippines Division, to Pershing: "Of course there is nothing to be done, but I understand it has long been a custom to bury (insurgents) with pigs when they kill Americans. I think this a good plan, for if anything will discourage the (insurgents) it is the prospect of going to hell instead of to heaven. You can rely on me to stand by you in maintaining this custom. It is the only possible thing we can do to discourage crazy fanatics."

While these writings do provide strong evidence that United States forces used pigs as a tactic against Muslim insurgents, there is no evidence that Pershing himself committed these acts.

The interesting thing is that Trump is choosing to waft this myth right now. That is, he's thinks its a good idea to let radical Muslim terrorists know we might mess with their dead bodies in a way that he (presumably) thinks they think will wreck their afterlife. He might think that threat will influence the terrorists, but not necessarily. He might just think that he had a cheeky tweet to entertain his fans and confound his MSM antagonists. It's a new topic: Pershing!

It gets rid of whatever the old topic was.

Purging with Pershing.

But, seriously, the bodies of the enemy dead should not be desecrated.

Remember: "Horror at Fallujah / SAVAGE ATTACK: Bodies dragged through street, hung from bridge 4 U.S. contractors killed in ambush hours after 5 soldiers slain in Iraq."

And the respect the previous administration showed to the body of our arch-enemy bin Laden:

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed," the May 2 email from Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reads. "The deceased's body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body slid into the sea.''

AND: From 2013: "One of the U.S. Marines who was caught on video urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters has broken his silence to say that he's not sorry for what he did and he'd do it again."

"These were the same guys that were killing our family, killing our brothers," Sgt. Joseph Chamblin told ABC News affiliate WSOC in his first interview since the 2011 incident. Chamblin said he did regret any repercussions it may have had on the Marines, "but do I regret doing it? Hell no."

"WikiLeaks releases more than half a million US diplomatic cables from the momentous year of 1979."

Announces Julian Assange:

If any year could be said to be the "year zero" of our modern era, 1979 is it.

"If we were to start profiling people of 'Middle-Eastern' or 'brown' appearance, jihadists will simply recruit white Muslims from the Caucasus, like the Tsarnaev brothers..."

"... who struck at the Boston Marathon. In fact, al Qaeda has been trying to use our very prejudices against us for many years, which is why Osama Bin Laden recruited a 'white army of terror' from the huge number of converts that joined his cause. If it is only men we profile, jihadists will train women, such as the Chechens did with their Black Widows, or this latest Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino. Astoundingly, male jihadists have even cross-dressed in burkas to avoid capture. If it is any adult of fighting age that we screen for, jihadists have turned to grandmother suicide bombers and even animals laden with explosives."

Wrote Maajid Nawaz, whose Wikipedia page I'm reading after seeing him on TV talking about Brexit.

Bob Woodward: Bush did not lie about WMD in Iraq.

Today, on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Bob Woodward about the questions the GOP candidates have been getting about Iraq: Was the 2003 invasion a mistake? Woodward answered:

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don't let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but "A lot of people think he really didn't want to keep any troops there." Woodward agrees that Obama didn't want to keep troops there and elaborates:

"But bin Laden also wrote extensively — and at times endearingly — to aunts, wives, sons and daughters from whom he had been separated."

"'What is the latest funny news?' he wrote in one undated message to a daughter whom he asked to 'forgive me if I made you mad — and perhaps for having done so frequently.'"

What's on bin Laden's bookshelf?

Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward....

"Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant 'fairy tale' on the word of a single, unnamed source."

"This source fits the profile of nearly all of [Seymour] Hersh’s informants in the national security world: a grizzled veteran of the intelligence sector who, freed from the shackles of government work, has become a withering critic of the national security state and American hubris overseas...," writes James Kirchick, in Slate.

The problem is that Hersh hasn’t moved past 1969: It’s always My Lai, and the government is always composed of people as devious as the denizens of the Nixon White House....

Hersh’s placement of this article in the London Review of Books, a literary journal whose take on international affairs tends toward the Chomskyan... is notable in that it has become the go-to place for Hersh’s exposés of American perfidy in the Obama era.... The first piece Hersh published in the London Review of Books, a fantastical 2013 concoction accusing Syrian rebels of gassing their own civilians and the Obama administration of “cherry-picked intelligence” in its brief against the Assad regime, was passed over by [The New Yorker], as it similarly passed over his fable about the Bin Laden raid... The New Yorker, where Hersh has contributed since 1971, published Hersh’s thinly sourced calumnies when his target was the Bush administration. Yet the magazine suddenly lost interest the minute he started accusing Obama of “lies, misstatements and betrayals.”

If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

"Brian Williams Might Have Also Lied About Navy SEALs, the Pope, and the Berlin Wall."

"We have some idea which of our special operations teams carried this out," Williams told David Letterman shortly after bin Laden was killed. "It happens to be a team I flew into Baghdad with, on the condition that I would never speak of what I saw on the aircraft, what aircraft we were on, what we were carrying, or who we were after."

In another telling, Williams said that he had been "told not to make any eye contact with them or initiate any conversation" with the SEALS. But, he said, that didn't stop him from befriending the men. According to Williams, he got into a conversation with one of the elite soldiers about the knife he was carrying. "Darned if that knife didn’t show up at my office a couple weeks later," Williams said. He also claimed that, nearly a decade after this supposed embed, a member of SEAL Team 6 sent him a souvenir from the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. "I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned," Williams said during another Late Show appearance. "And in it was a piece of the fuselage of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. Sent to me by one of my friends."

Why are we only noticing the improbability of these tall tales now? It was out there in plain view all along. I mean, I wasn't viewing it. I didn't watch him on Letterman, but apparently this is Williams's style and why the network promoted him.

It's not enough for Williams to be fired. In fact, it's beside the point. If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

It's the NBC brand. Be out and proud!

"The ego, faced with the prospect of its own dissolution, becomes hypervigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people."

"It is striking that a single psychedelic experience — an intervention that [the neuuroscientist named Robin] Carhart-Harris calls 'shaking the snow globe' — should have the power to alter these patterns in a lasting way."

From "The Trip Treatment/Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results," by Michael Pollan. Great article. Read the whole thing.

I've been listening to the podcast version of the article, and the word "hypervigilant" is the one I remembered to search for the quote I wanted to blog. I was interested to see that The New Yorker has only ever used the word hypervigilant/hyper-vigilant 21 times.  (There was a time when The New Yorker was punctilious about consistency and would have stuck to one spelling of a word!) Here's an assortment:

MARCH 17, 2014: "The band, more New Wave than punk, hadn’t started yet, and the only thing to look at onstage was the opening band, whose members were packing up their equipment while hypervigilant girls in vampire makeup and torn fish-net stockings washed around them in a human tide that ebbed and flowed on the waves of music crashing through the speakers."

JUNE 17, 2013: "Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion."

MARCH 29, 2013: "Following a first scare... some people... pay closer attention to how their body feels. Hypervigilance leads them to notice more symptoms—is that a new tingle?—and become more alarmed."

OCTOBER 24, 2011: "Carrie [Mathison, the character on 'Homeland'] lives by the cherished motto of the hypervigilant, 'Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to kill you,' without suspecting for a moment that it’s excessive or the wrong way to look at things."

AUGUST 8, 2011: "'You can only be hyper-vigilant for so long,' the special-operations officer said. 'Did bin Laden go to sleep every night thinking, The next night they’re coming? Of course not. Maybe for the first year or two. But not now.'"

DECEMBER 13, 2010: "These symptoms he tells me in a matter-of-fact voice. In this way, the husband shifts to the wife the puzzle of what to make of such things, if anything; like certain emotions, too raw to be defined, this kind of information can be transferred only to another, the caring and hyper-vigilant spouse."

FEBRUARY 2, 2009: "Just as nervous fliers may think they can keep a plane in the air by being hypervigilant, many of us think we can keep Obama safe by watching him every second; in a way, it was reassuring not to see too much of him on the journey—it meant that he was O.K., that we didn’t have to worry about him."

Jeffrey Goldberg is "Remembering a time when Islamist extremists wanted to persuade reporters, not kill them."

He begins: "In the spring of 2000, I lived for a month in a Taliban madrasa, a religious seminary, located on the Grand Trunk Road outside of Peshawar, in Pakistan." Excerpt:

The subject of my religion came up in conversation. The imam was fascinated. He was anti-Semitic, but impersonally so. His abstract detestation of Jews was trumped by a practical curiosity. He phoned a friend who, like him, had never met someone from my tribe. That friend brought another friend. Soon, we were having a colloquy on several subjects—the putative righteousness of Osama bin Laden’s cause, the alleged treachery of Bill Clinton—but our focus narrowed to matters of faith. I raised the subject of Muhammad’s often complicated, sometimes violent relationship with the Jews of Arabia. These men, like many Muslims, believed that the Jews had behaved perfidiously toward their Prophet, and they endorsed Muhammad’s decision to behead some 600 of his Jewish enemies, the males of the vanquished Banu Qurayza tribe.

Back then, it did not seem foolhardy to engage Muslim terrorists on the subject of beheading....

A question I have for Goldberg is whether it was really true that the "extremists wanted to persuade reporters" and something changed. Or was it always the case that reporters were exploited as a means to an end — they were used to communicate and the head-cutting videos are powerfully communicative? You were always being used. That would be my hypothesis.

"In a SEAL version of Rashomon, the ostensibly silent warriors of the special operations community..."

"... have been going after one another over what really happened that night in Abbottabad."

ISIS Determined to Strike in U.S.

On "Fox News Sunday" yesterday, Lindsey Graham had a talking point he wanted to make sure he nailed:

I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorist ability to operate in Syria and Iraq... a direct threat to the United States... the threat we face from being attacked from Syria, now Iraq... these people... attacking the homeland?

They have expressed a desire to do so.... protect the American homeland.... an existential threat to the homeland.... we're threatened. T

he homeland is threatened by the presence of ISIL in Iraq and Syria.... the threats we face... protecting the homeland... a direct threat to our homeland... we're about to be attacked in a serious way because of the threat emanating from Syria and Iraq... It is about our homeland.

And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages....

... there are more terrorist organizations with more safe havens, with more money, with more weapons, and more capabilities to attack the homeland than there was before 9/11. Mr. President, if you don't adjust your strategy, these people are coming here....

Graham is laying the groundwork. He wants it on record, the equivalent of the famous pre-9/11 memo: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

Obama's newest famous quote is "I'm really good at killing people" — but what was the context?

The Daily Mail cherry-picked the quote out of the new book "Double Down: Game Change 2012." The book's not out for normal people until tomorrow. (Buy it here.) So I'm stuck wondering. DM says:

A Washington Post report makes passing reference to the anecdote, saying that while speaking with his aides about the drone program Obama bragged that he was 'really good at killing people.' The Obama Administration has not responded specifically to reports of the alleged boast from the President.

The Daily Mail is punctilious enough to say "alleged" but can't resist characterizing the words as a "boast." We're told he "bragged." The headline says "President Obama joked...." Let's assume for the purposes of discussion that Obama really did say those words in that order. But let's try to imagine why he might have said that.

Perhaps you're imagining a childish man, exclaiming "I'm really good at killing people" like a numbskull teenager playing a first-person-shooter video game. Or maybe you're picturing someone more like a movie super-villain in his vast underground lair, cackling to his fawning minions as he creepily caresses his "kill" button.

But it's possible to think of a context in which Obama would be sympathetic. I could imagine a serious discussion of the lack of genuine accomplishment in his administration.

O: What will history say we have done? Nothing! I was the embodiment of hope, and everything I have touched has turned to ashes.

AIDE: But, sir....

O: What are the accomplishments? Name the accomplish of the Obama administration! What will people say?!

AIDE: He killed bin Laden.

O: A pathetic, isolated idiot sitting in his hovel, watching bad porn. The SEALs blew him away. That was really amazing of me.

AIDE: [Names several significant terrorists who have been killed through the drone program.]

O [sadly, sarcastically]: I'm really good at killing people.

Intent on writing this little dialogue, I searched for a list of 4 or 5 good names for the aide to tick off in an effort to bolster the President's spirits. See if you can do that. I couldn't do it. I kept running into "A List Of Children Killed By Drone Strikes In Pakistan and Yemen." Go there. Scroll through those names (and ages) and think about that context and why Obama might have said I'm really good at killing people.