Slight hijack:
Why is (what seems like) a time-sensitive, small-scale tactical decision left to the President instead of a local commander? Where’s the national security interest or political necessity in having someone that high up deal with 3 pirates and one cargo captain?
The Admiral at the press conference said that Obama authorized them to kill people, and the local commander made the decision when the time was called for.
I think the national security interest is the fact that the eyes of the world were upon them, and if the decision was going to be made to shoot three or four people in the head it should come from the person with whom the buck stops.
The word is “founder”. When a ship is filling with water and in danger of sinking it is said to be foundering, not floundering. Sorry, this is one of my pet peeves right up there with “Begs the question”.
Also for the record, I’m a die-hard bleeding-heart liberal, and I also would have expected GWB to handle things the same way, would have supported it, and would not have blamed him had something gone wrong. Oh and, I also supported (with reservations and fears that it would all go wrong, as it did) the invasion of Afghanistan.
To be fair, if it was filling with water and being towed along, it would almost certainly also be floundering – “struggling with stumbling or plunging movements”. It was a foundering, floundering, faltering, flooding failure of a floater.
I hope we have a memorial service for the dead pirates/er, third world income redistribtion agents.
Ok, now that’s really bringing politics into it. Oy!
Well hopefully the international community will join together to come up with a long term game plan to combat these pirates.
This raised the stakes on both sides. Ugh.
We’ll see. This has been going on for ages.
I thought that when a vessel flounders it is filled with many flat, tasty fishes.
This blog from ABC News has loads of very interesting information. Not how it exactly went down, but things that happened before then, especially in Washington.
<another hijack (heh heh)>
What’s the pet peeve for “begging the question”? Is there an equivalent to intensive purposes for this phrase?
<end hijack (heh heh)>
…or an issue being “mute”?
All Obama did was to authorize the use of force. A wise decistion, but not brain surgery. I’d make the same statement if it were anyone else in office, Republican or Democrat. Only those directly involved are due credit.
As to how the Navy did it, the probability is that we’ll never know. Yet another wise decision.
The USS Bainbridge was towing the lifeboat. The good guys saw all three bad guys at once, one of the bad guys aimed a gun at the Captain, and the good guys blew their brains out from 25m away.
No, the Commander-in-Chief can also make the wrong critical decision, like out-sourcing the critical parts of one war in his fervor to launch another one.
slight hijack
shiver My brother begins BUDS (boot camp for SEALS) training in June…
If this pirate stuff continues, it’s just going to be all the more scary the things he’ll have to do.
I hate Bush’s guts, but there is a difference between that and, “We will probably have to kill some civilian citizens of a country we are not at war with. Is that OK?”
“Hell yes, they’re pirates for crying out loud.”
I guess Obama won’t be able to count on the pirate vote next election.