Monday, May 2, 2011
On March 15, President Barack Obama met in his office — you know, the round one, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington D.C. — with ESPN college basketball analyst Andy Katz. They spent the morning shooting the breeze and filling out a March Madness bracket, a huge poster with the presidential seal certifying that yes, indeed, the man presiding over one of the most tumultuous periods in American history spent some time talking hoops, and that this bracket was the result.
Sort of predictably, and entirely ridiculously, critics of the President jumped on the man for wasting time while the world was in chaos. There is a crippling national deficit, and there are wars in distant lands to tend to, Mr. President. You have no time to talk hoops, according to these people.
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kristen Kukowski said in a statement that Obama was more concerned with his bracket than “monitoring the crisis in the Middle East,” as if he would have been able to end the war by watching Al-Jazeera instead of writing “Kansas” six times.
As it turns out, the President managed to find some time to actually be the President that week, funnily enough. Somehow, spending 10 minutes filling out a bracket didn’t kill his schedule for the entire week.
On March 14, the day before he sat down with Katz to talk hoops, he sat down with his closest advisers. He was reportedly briefed on a potential hiding spot for September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. It was the first of the series of discussions that would ultimately lead to bin Laden’s death. What was said in that room would be discussed five more times before Sunday, May 1, but always behind closed doors, with the same ears listening.
On Friday, April 29, Obama gave the order.
This Sunday, as a product of those closed-door talks between Obama and his advisers, Navy SEAL Team Six — which one television pundit called “the most dangerous people on the face of the earth” — infiltrated a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, engaged in a firefight, and took down the deadliest terrorist of the 21st century. Because the President and his advisers had so carefully planned the infiltration of bin Laden’s compound, and because of the exquisite precision of the SEALs, the entire operation took 40 minutes.
It was the finest moment in American military history since the end of World War II. It may have been better, because it didn’t take two atomic bombs. It took a well-placed bullet from the rifle of a Navy SEAL. No Americans were killed.
No Americans were killed, and Osama bin Laden was, and the President managed to fill out a March Madness bracket.
What a wonderful country this is.
— Edited by Marla Daniels
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