NEW PALTZ JOURNAL

Writing as Martin McPhillips, I’ve made a series of comments at the local blog New Paltz Gadfly about the arrest of (now former; he has resigned) New Paltz school board president Don Kerr.

I am not among Kerr’s fans, but there are troubling questions about his arrest (given what the police have told the public to date) that I detail in the first comment here. I made more comments further down, and the comments by Ed Burke are also worth reading. Much of that further discussion revolves around drugs in the schools.

I made the final comment on a post about New Paltz and marijuana.

And I made some earlier comments about the Kerr case on this post.

My point in the comments specifically about Kerr is that the police have yet to describe the probable cause for his arrest, and that so far the nut of the matter is that he could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it turns out that there’s more than that behind the arrest, then I’ll take it from there. But Kerr has already been effectively hung on the scaffold of public opinion without the police having given a sufficient reason for him to be arrested and charged. That puts the New Paltz police, not to mention Kerr, in a rather awkward position.

Eschatology is that branch of theology concerned with where reality and the soul are heading, the ultimate disposition of all things. In the materialist view, human beings end when they are all dead, and everything else ends somewhere along the path to when the universe either drifts completely apart, to the point where it is of no effect, a death by entropy, or where it implodes back beyond the infinitesimal into non-existence. That’s why materialists are so dull and ultimately so empty. They only answer the questions that materialism asks and declare all else fiction, as if materialism wasn’t the most made up of all final conceits.

I write that paragraph, in preparing to review Francis W. Porretto’s third book in his Realm of Essences series (hard to continue calling it a trilogy when he’s contemplating a fourth book), as a limbering up exercise, much the way a boxer limbers up in the ring before the first round. Porretto is a Roman Catholic and the Realm of Essences series is described by him as Christian fantasy. His work is all I know of the genre, but I don’t really ever believe in the idea of genre (and I mean believe in it the way a kennel club believes that individual dogs must conform to the standards of their breed to attain recognition, and certainly must produce the papers of pedigree to even be considered). So genre, I speak for myself, ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

Let’s go deeper. Look into Carl Jung’s Archetypes or Plato’s Ideal Forms and you look into very literal approaches to Metaphysics. There is in Jung or Plato another realm beyond the physical from which our realm is, what, copied? Inspired? Thrown together? In other words, in the literal Realm Metaphysical are found the forms, and/or forces, that give shape to our raw material, our physical laws, our rocks, our very flesh, much as the shadows that form in our human minds as ideas originate all human artifacts. You think of DNA, for instance, and you know that you have, not a tiny model that expands to full size, but a code that instructs proteins what shapes to take, and these instructed proteins keep building until the whole living thing is formed. Where does the DNA code come from? If you’re not a strict materialst and hence do not believe that the code, why, it’s based on the biological shape that it in turn produces from, ah, its code, then it is possible, if you don’t believe that, to see that code as a translation, by the numbers that mysteriously underlie our world, from that other realm to this one.

Well, if you think along those lines, and can place it all in the context of Creator, Creation and Creature, and can harmonize in six parts, and want to think about such things, then you are ready for this third novel in Porretto’s Realm of Essences series. But I hasten to add that you don’t in fact have to be ready for it to read it. How often are we really ready for anything anyway?

Here, in Shadow of a Sword, we have a many millennia long battle shaping up in a time resembling our present, complete with modern attitudes and contemporary politics. The combatant archetypes are akin to the disgustingly evil Iago of Shakespeare’s Othello (who in the Realm is known as Tiran, but in our sphere possesses the body and mind of Adam Zlugy, a political consultant with the power to tell people not what to think but what they are thinking and what they will do) versus the Two Samurai (one from the Realm named Franz who lives among us as Malcolm and then a special creature, Christine, who is both of and not of the Realm). We know both of them from the first two novels in the series, Chosen One and On Broken Wings (both very highly recommended).

Much like in the series of The Godfather movies, the principal character of the Realm series dies early, in the early parts of the second book, On Broken Wings. His name is, of course, Louis Redmond, a Nietzchean superman suffused with Christian virtue. He leaves behind his mentor (the aforesaid Malcolm) and his protégé (the aforesaid Christine). As series readers, we miss Louis, but his death has heightened the action in a way that keeps us going like there was no tomorrow. Porretto has indeed become a master of the urgent present, and his characters, both the natural and the seriously more than natural, walk that edge. What is urgent in this world is equally urgent in the Realm, though it could hardly be said that the respective timepieces are synchronized. Though, at the end of the day, everyone in this world lives and talks as we do, and whatever special talents anyone has do not release them from worldly existential yearnings, what I sometimes call the dynamic yearnings of the Lifeworld.

There, I don’t think that I’ve spoiled anything, while hoping that appetites are left stimulated. Readers of the first two novels, accustomed to Porretto’s fluid and engaging prose, will find the landscaping this time out harder of surface and more direct. There’s also a political boulevard running through the middle of this novel and it’s pretty damn interesting. Porretto’s search for honest men in his fiction has led him to search for something even more unlikely, an honest politician, and by finding one he realizes that he ipso facto has placed him in harm’s way. There are good and deadly reasons why politics is the wrong place and wrong time for an honest man.

In closing, we all ask ourselves at different points in our lives what the hell is wrong with the world? In this series, Francis Porretto has tried to illustrate that wrongness in several of his characters and thrown them into contrast with characters of heroic virtue. The first two novels hint at the deeper reaches, the not-of-this-world reaches, of that wrongness, and here he follows through on that, and actually answers the question.

The privileged political class known as public employee unions have used their power to devour revenue in municipalities. Now the balloon is turning to lead.

“Postmodern consciousness” is flat — the awareness itself is not so much “through a glass darkly” as flat against the glass, the texture of the things themselves unavailable to it. So that there’s only a two-dimensional apprehension of four-dimensional reality, and the ideas of things are taken in flatness as well, instead of in their full essence. This explains the contemporary dearth of insight, logical or essential. Postmodern awareness is not real awareness, because it drains meaning out of things and so cannot reach their real value nor determine their real relationality, each to the other, all for the purpose of instead making all valuations relativistic, all equal, and hence all equally empty of their meaning.

Intellectuals have given thinking a bad name. Postmodernism doesn’t even require an active liar or a positive lie; it is first and foremost in its essence a withdrawal from the possibility of truth, and so the most fundamental human action in thought, a search for the truth in things, is amputated, has no value, and therefore cannot value. When everything is flattened out, then things that matter in the privileged realm of emptiness sometimes called “political correctness” (which is a very real realm, a culture unto itself, and constantly on the make) can be given great emphasis and power because those will be among the few things marked to stand out. The otherwise missing feeling and passion of the active intellect is poured fraudulently into them.

In the brave new world the ethical person is handicapped by the clarity required to make judgements and then doubly handicapped by any judgements he might make; he is also confronted by a “new ethics” that are only enriched by the point of view they represent, and to which he cannot be made privy, because they are, in essence, a private joke. This is the dictatorship of relativism.

The New York State Senate’s vote to legalize “gay marriage” was very much the same as voting to legalize “2 + 2 = 5″ and using the force of law to require that everyone believe it is true. Don’t kid yourself about the “religious exemptions” thrown into the bill late in the process. That’s a very narrow category compared to the overall impact this deranged law will have.

The slogan “marriage equality,” used endlessly to promote this tyranny, is a meaningless concept that has been used to equate homosexual sodomy with real sex between a man and a woman. Its implicit demand is that we ignore the obvious and believe that these two radically different things are the same, that homosexual sodomy forms the basis of the same kind of relationship that exists between a man and a woman, and thus the two are equal and deserving of equal treatment within the ancient institution of marriage and the law. But they are nothing alike, one being a mere simulation of real sex, a misapplication of sexual energy, without the biological opposition and complementarity of the two sexes that makes real sex real.

“Marriage equality” is the tip of the propaganda spear used to threaten the truth away from the lie of “gay marriage.” Watching this come to pass in my beloved New York State has been a long agonizing moment for me. I understood that something like this could happen, but when it arrived I was still stunned by its blunt force impact. I shouldn’t have been. One needs to be awake and prepared when society is being attacked from within the institutions of its own government.

For Andrew Cuomo, the vile governor of New York, who “promised” that he would wreak this destruction, I cannot find a civil word. I don’t think that the punishments he deserves have even been available since the 14th Century. A museum would have to be borrowed. He is a rotten bastard, a most miserable creep, with the air of a butch SA stormtrooper behind that frozen mask of a face. Making his own beady-eyed weasel father look stable and thoughtful, he is the typical modern politician who lives in brilliant isolation from the truth and can neither afford nor bother to know anything about it.

Complementing Cuomo’s efforts with a public relations push was the insipid Slob Mayor of New York City, the regrettable, ever whining, multi-threat fascist, Michael Bloomberg, who was elected through the authority of his own billion-dollar purse and because the Democratic machine that controls New York City hasn’t been able to find a presentable opponent for him from its diseased ranks. Bloomberg is of the lowest character and inflated by the inborn instincts of a shit-eating swine.

Forget about the usual lineup of creepy Democratic legislators in Albany. These are the sickest liberals in the world. They know nothing, without any way to fix that. They live in a tradition that has spilled endless sewage into the once magnificent Empire State, stealing from citizens without a second thought, and now attacking the most fundamental social institutions of marriage and family as though it were their duty. They talk as though normal people were religious zealots for resisting the “progressive” improvements on reality that they insist on making, while also insisting that they are qualified to change the very meaning of marriage. It is inconceivable to them what they really are: filthy gangsters, like all tyrannical outfits.

As for those few Republican state senators who threw themselves in with this, with the purring self-righteousness of wannabes at the big Manhattan cocktail parties, let their names come to be synonyms for cowardice and fecklessness.

But don’t get this wrong, this has been the work of the Left. Islamic jihadists blow up buildings, the Left destroys entire civilizations.

Holy moly. Just caught a clip of New Paltz mayor Jason West on with the staccato and pomo Rachel Maddow, onetime butch protégé of MSNBC’s former stormtrooper Keith Olbermann. West appeared with Maddow the night before the New York State Senate voted to legalize “gay marriage.” It’s always a nice match for West when he can find someone in the media without the capacity to put him out of his depth. He rehearsed his usual rushingly glib song and dance, using the term “marriage equality” several times, and allowed the “gay weddings” that he performed in 2004, which was the reason Maddow was interviewing him, to be recognized for the pioneering and heroic work that he believes they were.

You cannot show any sign of uncertainty when you’re working a con job as high concept as “gay marriage,” but West’s certainty is so absolute that it’s a tell. He’s always on the high cliff peering out to the deep blue sea, and that ground below, that’s not to be looked at, though a glance downward, properly done, will tell the small people that he is, well, a man occupying great heights.

The  glance downward in this interview came at the end, when West suggested that people from “bigoted and homophobic backgrounds” might still be holding out in recognizing the grand justice that is “gay marriage.”

That’s a real grifter’s trick, to point a finger at people who defend the many millennia old meaning of marriage, the one rooted in what is biologically obvious about men and women, the one that is the stable foundation of family and society, and call them bigots.

Actually, it takes a homocentric bigot to make such an accusation, and West is certainly that. But the important thing from his point of view is to get his meal ticket punched, and that’s what “gay marriage” is for him.

The New York State Senate, led by a handful of self-abasing Republicans, has repudiated and debauched our roots in Western Civilization, assaulted and severed its Judeo-Christian underpinnings, annihilated its deepest tradition, and the celebration has begun over this horrible attack on our posterity.

This is a crucial moment in the decline toward disintegration of the United States.

What a catastrophe.

Matthew Shaffer writes about his conversation with the playwright David Mamet:

What kind of conservative is Mamet now? Friedrich Hayek, both directly and indirectly via Thomas Sowell, is the major influence on his political thought. Mamet repeatedly returns to Hayek’s “tragic vision” — the acceptance that humans are incapable of inventing a perfect society, and required to choose among evils. But the most unusual thing about Mamet’s conservatism might be how, well, ordinary it is. Conservatism carries a stigma in Mamet’s circles. So when the rare littérateur dissents from liberalism, we might expect him to be snobbish or effete, distancing himself from the déclassé elements of the Right.

Not Mamet. He is aggressive — even rude. He calls multiculturalism “garbage, pure nonsense.” He says “many liberals” have a “preverbal mind,” which, “when confronted with arguments it can’t refute, just sees red.” He says “the Obama administration is the perfect example of the Europeanization of America in the nanny state.” He celebrates America as a “Christian country,” and feels no need to dissociate from the dreaded “Christian Right.” He condemns “elites” repeatedly. He says “the State of Israel wants peace within its borders, and its enemies want to kill all the Jews — both parties are clear about that.” He approvingly acknowledges “Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Glenn Beck.” He exalts Sarah Palin. In a phrase: He eats conservative red meat.

Abusing every concept of American civilization within his very limited reach (marriage, freedom, equality, law, and the role of religion in society), Jason West is back at the scene of his original fifteen minutes of fame.

Now riding the entrails of the vile governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who is trying to make his progressive and postmodern bones with an aggressive and scandalous push to legalize ”homosexual marriage” in this once great state, West made a brief (but not brief enough for me) appearance on Time-Warner’s YNN Hudson Valley news channel. He was invited to comment because he performed “gay weddings” back in 2004, during his first go around as mayor here.

Rushing out some glib rhetoric about freedom and equality, and comparing this attempt to normalize homosexual sodomy to the civil rights movement, West manages to insult blacks, disregard natural law, show his customary bigotry toward the religious, and annoy anyone with common sense; he also still confuses the role of an executive with that of the judiciary (having the learning curve of a hamster, along with the instincts of a totalitarian dictator). He hasn’t even been back in office for a month.

Everyone knows that West has an eye for grandstanding on national issues from his little perch as mayor of a small village, and I suspect that he wants the 2012 Green Party nomination for president so bad that he aches for it. That would keep his dinner pail full for the rest of his life, and there are indeed a lot of poor suckers out there in Green land who mirror the suckers here in New Paltz who gave this awful narcissist the mayor’s job back. So it would not be a bold assumption that West is cooking up some stunt to get him back in the news to advance his radical Green persona.

But I suspect that the whole deal, including the second time around as mayor, is going to go very badly for him, very badly.

Father’s Day is never that big a day for me because I think about my dear Dad every day. He’s been gone for decades yet I feel increasingly close to him, as though he’s right here in the room with me.

I think of him as a great, great guy, and credit him, and my mother, with anything that’s good about me and gone right for me and hold them blameless for anything that isn’t and hasn’t. They gave me all the moral and common sense tools I needed to do anything I wanted, and I made all the choices — although in my continuing conversations with God, I see His hand in guiding me away from many things that were not necessarily bad for me, but just the wrong thing for me.

I think that Dad probably saw his own life and his relationship with God in a similar way, though I don’t recall him ever saying that to me in so many words.

I once described Dad as “the least strange man I’ve ever known,” and that’s to the credit of his straightforwardness. While each man is a mystery, Dad wasn’t big on playing that card. At the same time, I’ve also described him as something of a “Jesuit mystic.” He was unstrange and mystical. Not misty-eyed mystical, but deeply connected to God in a way where his essential thoughts were molded by his faith. This would surprise someone who only knew him superficially, because Dad was a serious gambler, on the ponies, and often a two-fisted drinker. But despite those two curses he was a more serious man than most I have ever met. I think that he played at being a rogue to make himself more accessible to others, perhaps to compensate also for his physical disability. (A youthful encounter with an automobile nearly cost him his leg and left him with a frightful limp.)

I think that what made Dad so serious was that he could see ideas as essences. I think that he was a phenomenologist without knowing what that could be. He was too clear a thinker for most people, although he amused himself and others with stories half or wholly made up, and I think that was in some way his way of being Irish. But when he was serious, he was all in on serious, and he spoke often of honesty and integrity.

With a strong sense of everyday skepticism about the world he advised to “believe nothing you read and only half of what you see.” That didn’t really make sense to me as a kid, but now I see it as a building block of wisdom. Dad was not a bookish man; he was a man of the daily newspaper (as am I, to be frank). His “internet” was the array of dailies that once flourished in New York, which included the World-Telegraph & Sun, The Journal-American, The Herald-Tribune, The Mirror, et al. Dad used them all to put his standard model of the world together and he did a pretty good job of it, though he was certainly the very farthest thing from an intellectual. He craved plain speaking and plain truth. He wasn’t interested in any cake decorations.

He did two things for a living, seemingly alternating between the two. He sold cars and he managed grocery or other kinds of retail stores. Up early every morning, shaved to perfection, his wavy hair perfectly combed and held in place with a dab of tonic, usually out the door before the rest of the house was up, he might return a good twelve hours later, trying to be there for dinner, occasionally with a few serious drinks in him, but he had usually earned those. If he didn’t get “clipped” by the ponies, he’d have his “roll” in his pocket, that big wad of cash that I loved seeing. No credit cards back then. Those, he probably thought, were for the people who lived outside town, in the big houses. For “little guys” like him, the “roll” spoke to his gainful employment and his luck at the track that day.

God loved my Dad and I don’t believe that He punished him all that much. I miss him even as I get closer to him. I wish he was here, even at 105, which is what he would turn this summer.

We spent a lot of time riding in the car together, Dad and I did, and he used to infuriate me and I think that amused him. I think he got a kick out of me. He was indeed the Jesuit mystic, but I was the Dominican inquisitor, and he loved that, probably even as it scared him a bit.

I don’t think that he was crazy about Father’s Day. It might have been a little too wimpy for his tastes. He graciously accepted every last bottle of shaving lotion, but probably felt put on the spot to be especially Dad-ish on a single day when he was Dad every day.

He was a Democrat but knew that liberals were basically commies. He liked FDR and Truman, but perhaps saw through them. He could be suckered occasionally by a politician’s act, but he didn’t trust politicians, at all. He was deeply grieved by the progress of events in America going way back. He couldn’t always put his finger on something, but he knew that the environment was changing in the worst direction, and steadily so. He was actually a richly conservative man, held slightly back and off balance by his bad leg, deeply into the true meaning of things in the world, and despite his tendency to give vent to what was on his mind, suffered most of life’s beatings in silence, in communion with God.

Much to his credit and my mother’s, I would never trade them or my life for anyone else’s. They gave me much and all that they had. So on any Father’s Day, I count myself among the luckiest of sons.

Knowing what a political animal Obama is, why would he maliciously damage the economy? He wants a second term, but if we’re still in the dumpster, that won’t happen.

There is a three stage answer to that. My interpretation of Obama, which I believe is correct beyond a reasonable doubt, is based in what Stanely Kurtz uncovered about him (augmented by some other background on him) while researching Radical-in-Chief. That said, my conclusions begin where Kurtz stops. I don’t think that he would necessarily disagree with me, but to say what I do about this would mark him as a “right-wing extremist.” There are certain places one must not go.

First, there’s no question that Obama is, as you say, a “political animal,” but that’s a secondary characteristic. He is not simply another Bill Clinton. Far from it. He does not exist just to get elected. He expects to get elected. And he expects to be elected to fulfill a purpose, not simply to be re-elected.

Second, as Kurtz demonstrates beyond any doubt, Obama is a born and bred to be radical socialist. Only a few times does Kurtz let slip the ‘M’ word, but I have no doubt, none whatsoever, that not only is Obama a studied Marxist, but that he is in almost every respect an orthodox Marxist. This might confuse some because he took on the “community organizer” guise at an early age, but the theory behind that modality, as Kurtz shows, is to move Marxist concepts stealthily through grassroots organizing which eschews the use of Marxist language and to create a broad-based revolution from below, rather than from the top down. But of course that phase is ipso facto over with when Obama becomes president. It’s no more bottom up; he is at the top. But, as to community organizing, he still does that, but he’s doing it from the top (that’s another discussion, how he does that).

The Marxist-socialist theory behind community organizing is to break the system by overloading it (exactly as happened in the housing crisis) and use that crisis as an opportunity to build more socialist infrastructure. So, people who understand ObamaCare know that it is just a first step on the path to a single-payer fully nationalized health care system. Unless it’s repealed, and perhaps even if it is repealed at this point, that is its inexorable goal. Break down the existing medical industry infrastructure, half-done already, and revolutionize it with a state-run single payer system.

Third: To that point I’m pretty much in-line with Kurtz. That does explain, if you read it closely, why Obama would intentionally bring ruin to the economy: It’s an opportunity to create more socialism, starting with creating more dependency (look at the elevated levels to this point). So, just under this viewpoint, Obama is gambling that he can both ruin the economy and win a second term by feeding dependency and by using his “charismatist” skills to convince enough voters that he is not the problem. He has a huge advantage in deception and in a deception-receptive media waiting to serve him in that regard. But, bottom line on this: He is not banking on being re-elected. He wants to be re-elected. But his game is to inflict massive damage on the American economy and on society in his first term. Things that would take a decade or more to recover from, if they can be recovered from. There is sufficient structural damage already in the U.S. economy when he arrived. You can’t find an area where he hasn’t sought to exacerbate that damage. Just look at the surreal deficits or the addition of a third massive entitlement program on top of two already at bankruptcy stage massive entitlements. He was hell-bent to worsen this structural damage no matter what the political cost. Why? Kurtz’s answer is that it crashes the system and usher’s in Euro-style socialism or worse.

Now, my answer: The socialism is a come-on for his base. If there’s any socialism that comes out of this attack, and that’s what it is, an attack, then it will be the pathetic socialism of a third-world country. It will pass right over the European model, for which there is no capacity left in the American model, anyway. So, it’s not really socialism for America that he is after, it’s destruction. He wants not just a crash of the system, but a total collapse of America as we understand it.

Why? By my interpretation of Kurtz, and by the unbelievable levels of deception that went into the elevation of Obama, he is the best trained and most committed Marxist to come to power since Lenin. This is what the deception hides, even though much of what is hidden is in plain sight. Probably by the time he was 18, perhaps even younger, like many Americans on the Left, Obama believed in the Soviet Union. His mentor as a young teenager was a CPUSA member who would have instructed him that the Soviet Union was the ideal and that America was evil — and the Main Enemy, as the KGB callled the U.S.

So what happened? By the time Obama was 30, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Why had it collapsed? Because the Main Enemy had done it in with capitalist-imperialist tricks and sabotage. What’s to be done about it? Revenge.

You see, for an orthodox Marxist the principles of “scientific socialism” are never inoperable, they are just clouded with the false consciousness of “bourgeois principles.” You hear the language of Marxism virtually anytime you turn on a cable news station, always relentlessly hammering away on what is now popularly called “class warfare.” But the better term is “class struggle.” (And you hear not just the language of that traditional vertical axis of class struggle, you also hear the relentless language of the postmodern horizontal axis of class struggle, the identity politics of race, gender and sexuality, where the culture is struck with incessant blows to break the strength of family, church and community and to break their resistance to inexorable socialism.)

Obama, however, doesn’t view the U.S. as a project worth saving. It has already done too much damage in the world and its underlying principles and structure must be destroyed: “America delenda est.”

One of Obama’s main influences was Fanon. He sees the destruction of America as a benefit for the world’s masses and himself as a world-historical figure and first citizen of that world. This explains why he was at Trinity United Church. Wright was not the true radical in that church, Obama was. Wright just had the program that Obama wanted, and of course he had to deny Wright (with whom he stayed for most of his adult life) to get elected. He used race as the barrier to reason that it has become. No one else could have gotten away with membership in a blatantly racist *and* *Marxist* operation like Trinity United. But the media coughed its way through that and demonized anyone who would point at it. This is who Obama is. Much more than a political animal craving re-election. Much worse than anything his worst critics might imagine. As I’ve tried to put it, a character out of a novel that Orwell didn’t live to write.

I’ve written about Bobby Bates here before. He was the tall quiet kid down the block from me on Wayne Avenue in Suffern, New York. Two years older than me. Here is his page at The Wall.

He was killed in action on November 9, 1967 in Kontum, South Vietnam.

Bobby Bates is the person I think of on Memorial Day. I can still see a catch he made, over his shoulder, as a wide receiver on the Suffern High varsity. I think he would have made a good life for himself, raised a family. He would have been 63 this past March 11. He was 19 when he died.

Not just racist, and virulently racist, but also Marxist. Yet the electrified collar of political correctness fires its shock at every look in that direction. It’s not simply don’t say it. It’s don’t even let your thoughts wander there.

Much training and implantation of fear were needed to get Americans to this point. It is as if hypnosis, and post-hypnotic suggestions, have produced an aversion to glaring facts. What is it about these people, and what they have been able to do to this country? How deep into the nation’s sense of itself has this penetrated?

We have a KGB laboratory experiment in the White House.

You are as a nation imperiled if you believe a word out of the mouth of Barack Obama.

He will lie to you all day long.

“I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling, because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done in those circumstances.” — Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

I have no moral objection to killing bin Laden on sight. But I would have prefered classified capture; thorough, detailed interrogation; classified battlefield military tribunal; classified execution; announcement of capture, tribunal and execution a month later.

Not sure how the Archbishop of Canterbury would feel about that, but if it was my call my conscience would be clear.

Bin Laden is/was a historic personality, along the lines of Hitler or Carlos the Jackal or Che, but with a lot larger following/cult and in an active asymmetrical war against Western civilization and modernity. A special case, he needed special handling.

So, killing him on sight was a mistake, but there was nothing morally wrong with it. It was fully justified and it was justice. Given who is in charge in the Executive Branch, it might have been the best we could get.

Next day update: This dispatch from Reuters, published in today’s New York Times, reinforces my view that killing bin Laden, though not unjustified, was a mistake. There were things in his head that we needed, that are not going to be found on his computer drives. Things that likely only he could tell us.