Nobrainer’s Think Tank

To mix quotes from a couple of my favorite movies, “sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he tears your fucking head off, and he shits down your neck.”

I had no idea.

Moon rocks are classified as national treasures and owning them is illegal.

Someone unleash Nicolas Cage.

And his hair.

“With rail ‘you won’t have to take your shoes off to travel’ [Obama] said referring to the security screenings in place at today’s airports.”

Just remember what Obama was saying a couple of years ago in an effort to waste money on high speed rail. Somehow he suffered from a failure to imagine that terrorists might want to blow up a train, especially a fancy-schmancy high speed one. Now that risk is seeming a bit more plausible and even Democrats are urging greater “transportation safety” for Amtrak. To be fair, Schumer is only calling for a “do not ride” list and not elaborate security screenings. However, I’m having a hard time imagining how one would enforce such a list without each and every Amtrak station (many of which are completely Podunk) to have corral all riders into a security line so screeners could check everyone’s ticket against their ID.

Despite the silence here at the blog, I’m as happy as anyone about the demise of Bin Laden and our successful strategy to facilitate that demise. And I’m as intrigued about the entire story as I am happy. For example, I would love to know the whole story of the goings on between Pakistan and the US over the last couple months. Plus I would love to have heard the discussions and meetings that were used to form the final strategy. Of the most interest though, are a couple of storylines in the press that I have yet to see anyone connect.

We’ve been told that the raid acquired the “mother lode” of intelligence information. We’ve also been told that Obama vetoed a bombing raid because of concerns of injuring civilians and the possibility of not being able to identify a dead Osama. No one that I’ve seen, however, has even conjectured that maybe we avoided bombing the hell out the compound so that we could have the chance of acquiring all of that intelligence material.

I realize that the White House can choose storylines. And if I were in their shoes, I would probably go with the “we wanted to protect innocent people” line rather than the “we just wanted the hard drives” line. That said, I would like to hear that the intelligence was a significantly compelling reason for the chosen course of action. I cannot even imagine that the preservation of that intelligence wasn’t an important factor in the decision making process. But what if it wasn’t? If it wasn’t, then it has to be one of the biggest oversights, ever.