Nurse! Nurse!! Quick, the screens.

Jeez! What's Gordon Barlow been smokin'? Is he about to check into the rubber room?

The brain-dump that was his blog on the shooting of Osama Bin Laden makes for worrying reading.

 

I don't see how his blog intro, using a mildly racist Irish joke, and the peppering of Dead Osama 'jokes' squares with the normally tight-assed PC credentials of Oral Gob Drown (anag.). Perhaps it was intended to leaven the over excited, nay spittle flecked, body of the post. Still, perhaps I shouldn't be judging him by his own standards.

Opinion varies on what happened, not helped by the authorities providing an initial (possibly wishfully pre-scripted) account of events that needed correcting - and then that correction needed correcting and so on.

So Osama Bin Laden is or isn't dead and did or didn't plan and commission the 9/11 attacks on NY and was or wasn't shot while armed or unarmed in front of his or someone else's 12 year old daughter who was or wasn't in the room.

To help Old Groan Brow (anag.) reconnect with reality I'll state this:

Bin Laden is dead - if he wasn't all he had to do is pop up on Al Jazeera reading that days Jihadi Forecast.

Bin Laden took credit (and hence a bullet) for stuff he may not have done because he was a fantasist and a dreamer

However, he incited the killing of civilians for political ends on many occasions and said he'd squared it with the Koran - making him a liar as well as a terrorist.  What he was all about can be read, in his own words, in media interviews he gave if you trouble to search the web.

Did he deserve to die? Well he kinda talked himself into it over the years.

Did he deserve to die the way he did? Well it was quick compared to roasting alive in one of the Twin Towers.

Should he have been killed in front of his daughter? No. And the same goes for the parent(s) of the  8 children, all younger than 12, who were killed in the planes used for the 9/11 attacks.

The American political establishment hasn't ever looked far beyond it's own immediate imperatives in pursuing 'The War on Terror' and sometimes, to the wider world, their actions come across as ill considered, breathtakingly insensitive and counter productive in propaganda terms. The Islamists are often the more subtle propagandists - doesn't make them right though.

Oft times one side acts no better than the other in any conflict but, if it's a choice of systems, I'm going for the one that has separation of powers in a written constitution, that lets you pick your God (or no God) and allows both men and women to become whatever they are capable of becoming. And I even apply that to Mrs B.

Note to Gordon: Mellow out man - try and find a nice little Merino, maybe the bleating will attract one.