Turkey loses patience with the nutter entirely:
“Muammar Qaddafi, instead of taking our suggestions into account, refraining from shedding blood or seeking for ways to maintain the territorial unity of Libya, chose blood, tears, oppression and attacks on his own people,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Now, at this stage, the thing that needs to be done is Muammar Qaddafi to immediately step down from power that he holds in Libya.”
A reader writes:
When I was in Iraq I was on a mission once to find a dead Marine. The Marine had been killed, pulled out of his truck, and dragged through the streets. This is what these people thought of us. The people we had been told we were helping, and we thought, naively, had wanted our help. The war had just begun but this was a wake-up call that not all was at we were told. After dragging his body through the streets they hid his body somewhere. Our job was to recover it. We searched high and low throughout the town, but we never found him. Apparently, his body was discovered a few weeks later in garbage dump. In death bin Laden's body was given better treatment than is showed by our enemies to us. That is the way it should be. There is a difference between us, and too often we have went the easy route, but this time at least we remained true to our values. We gave one of our bitterest enemies all the rites of burial that are too often withheld from ours.
The other night when I learned of his death I was stunned and didn't believe the text message that told me he was dead.
Turning on the news and watching it all I sat dumb on my couch in disbelief. I saw the people that were gathering outside the White House celebrating and I understood why they were there. My girlfriend asked if I wanted to go but I didn't want to. I couldn't celebrate. Instead we went to a dark, dim local pub–the kind of bar that Marines always feel at home in–and I bought some Jim Beam watched the President's speech, and cried–for the first time in years. I don't cry at all ever, but that night I couldn't help it. I thought of all the pain, suffering, and sacrifice, and thought that maybe, just maybe, it finally means something. So while I could never go celebrate an event like that with jubilation and dancing in the streets, I don't condemn those that do.
(Photo: Jessica Falcone holds a candle and a photo of her Uncle, Craig Silverstein, who died on 9/11, during a candlelight vigil for 9/11 victims at a memorial site following the death of Osama Bin Laden May 2, 2011 in East Meadow, New York. 344 Nassau County residents lost their lives during the attacks on the World Trade Center. By Daniel Barry/Getty Images.)
Scheuneman and Goldfarb quit the fantasist's foreign policy team, as she distances herself from the Libyan intervention.
Matt Steinglass has sympathy for the birthers:
I remember having a general sense, during the 2004 presidential campaign, that I believed George W. Bush had probably skipped out on some of his Air National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. Then the "60 Minutes" documents turned out to have been pretty clearly faked, and I suspended that belief. And yet I still sort of think it might be true. Why is that? … [W]ith the source of the initial bits of information lost, because I've forgotten it, I'm left with this vague impression that this story could be true. Or false. But it's not incongruent with my worldview. Right now, if you asked me, I'd say I just don't know.
Juliet Lapidos screens Parks And Recreation for political undertones:
Whether we describe Leslie and Ron as "mom and dad" or "clueless-liberal and buddy-conservative," Parks and Recreation does not endorse one disposition over the other. In remaining silent on which character has the right priorities, perhaps the show is arguing that our capacity to care about other people isn't limitless. We end up rationing our reserves—some of us lavish our attention on neighbors, while others reserve their do-gooding for the faceless masses.
Alyssa Rosenberg begs to differ:
Parks and Recreation consistently argues that while Leslie’s enthusiasm may be overly intense, her devotion to public service is good for the community. Filling in the hole is a good idea, and not just because people in Pawnee tend to fall in it. … [E]ven Ron himself tends to acquiesce to Leslie’s view of government, fighting to save her park project, and even volunteering to give up his job to save hers. Leslie Knope’s cheerfulness turns out to be funny, but it’s Ron Swanson’s anti-government views that are Parks and Recreation's real joke.
(Image via the Tumblr Big Bowl Of Soup)
The Dish is looking for two interns to help with editorial content, assist with remedial tasks, and work on larger projects.
Interns will be full time (37.5 hours a week) and will be paid an hourly wage of $10.25. The position, unlike many internships, includes benefits (my bleeding heart insistence) and are a year-long commitment. Applicants must be in DC or willing to move to DC. We are hoping to hire interns within the next month or two. Start dates are semi-flexible.
We've wanted our own exclusive interns for years and now we are at the Beast, we can have them. We're looking for extremely hard workers, web-obsessives and Dishheads, who already understand what we do here. I should add that Zoe, Chris and Patrick all started as Atlantic interns with some of their duties for the Dish, and became full-time staffers because of the amazing work they produced. We're also looking for individuals who can challenge me and my assumptions and find stuff online that we might have missed.
To apply, please e-mail a (max 500-word) cover letter explaining why you want to work for the Dish and a resumé to Dish.Intern@newsweekdailybeast.com. The cut off for applications is Friday, May 13th.
Some student geographers, using techniques designed to track endangered species, came up with an 89 percent probability that bin Laden was living in Abottabad in a city less than 300 km from his last known location, a radius that included Abbotabad. Money quote:
Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called “island biogeography”: basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.
“The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town,” Gillespie says. “We hypothesized he wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.”
“It’s not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff,” he says. “But the same theories we use to study endangered birds can be used to do this.”
(Hat tip: Taegan.)
Salman Rushdie is rightly having none of it:
In the aftermath of the raid on Abbottabad, all the big questions need to be answered by Pakistan. The old flim-flam (“Who, us? We knew nothing!”) just isn’t going to wash, must not be allowed to wash by countries such as the United States that have persisted in treating Pakistan as an ally even though they have long known about the Pakistani double game—its support, for example, for the Haqqani network that has killed hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan.
This time the facts speak too loudly to be hushed up.
Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, was found living at the end of a dirt road 800 yards from the Abbottabad military academy, Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst, in a military cantonment where soldiers are on every street corner, just about 80 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. This extremely large house had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. And in spite of this we are supposed to believe that Pakistan didn’t know he was there, and that the Pakistani intelligence, and/or military, and/or civilian authorities did nothing to facilitate his presence in Abbottabad, while he ran al Qaeda, with couriers coming and going, for five years?
"After Geraldo made the official announcement that bin Laden was dead, I leaned back, put my hand to my forehead, closed my eyes, and exhaled about ten years of self-doubt in one long breath. My eyes watered immediately. I stopped hearing anything Geraldo said and started seeing fallen Eagles—former Delta teammates—Brandon, Chief, Pizza, Mike, Bob, and a half dozen other operators that kitted up on one hit after another, day after day, year after year, in the nearly ten-year long hunt for bin Laden. I could see their smiles, hear their radio calls, and smell their sweat and blood," – Dalton Fury, the pen name of the Delta Force commander at Tora Bora.
The Dish 