Morning Joe 5/4/2011 -- bin Laden hyperbole

On Morning Joe, the hyperbole regarding the killing of bin Laden was sickening. I mean, really, Joe Scarborough and his guests like Nora and Kelly O'Donnell and Ezra Klein and Margaret Carlson and Dee Dee Myers, all statists on the Left who love to praise government successes, were talking about this operation as if Obama killed bin Laden with his own bare hands like a deadly assassin in the night.

Joe S. was criticizing all the nitpicking regarding the details and conflicting accounts of the story, and then restated the administration's account which, of course, dramatized Obama's role. This obession with interventionist Presidents among political hacks like Scarborough is unbecoming. Mika told Scarborough that he would get flack for praising the President, and they both dismissed any criticism of Joe's fawning as ideological partisanship.

The administration is using the bin Laden operation as an opportunity to establish Obama as a strong leader and improve his poll numbers as if American citizens are so fickle that one successful operation will wipe away all the problems which Obama's interventions have caused or complicated.

Ezra Klein said that nothing succeeds like success, and that the American people like policies and operations that work, moreso than they like principled consistency. Joe S. agreed with Klein, saying "yes, yes", that pragmatic success trumps standing on principles. You know, our real enemy isn't terrorists -- bin Laden was a has-been who'd become irrelevant, and al Qaeda hasn't done much in years -- no, our real enemies are the political ideas that more and more pundits and politicians and intellectuals push in the political sphere. Our country is being operated by political means rather than social means, as Franz Oppenheimer critiqued decades ago. Politics is everything, and pundits like Klein are fine with myopic pragmatism if it helps their team stay in power, while criticising the other team for ideological manipulation. Myopic pragmatism is an ideology, just a dishonest ideology.