Here’s where my head is: The celebration and high-fiving seem kind of tragic-comic to me. I am very glad that at long, long last, we got this guy.

But he won already. Not with 9/11, but in what we as a nation did after it, for 10 years in response to it. We were led by the worst of all possible people (not Bush specifically, but the whole PNAC crowd) into a war that had nothing to do with 9/11 because we could easily confuse any arab/middle-east country with another and we became, as a nation, objectively *pro-torture*. Like, we had our highest ranking leaders defend torture and define it down. We took a medieval practice from the Inquisition and re-branded it to sound like a summer-sport and had a left vs. right “both sides” debate about how it is fine to do.

We spent nearly a trillion dollars going crazy after a plan involving plane tickets and 20 box-cutters was enacted. We rejected the idea of targeted police-style actions as unpatriotic and laughable and went to war, with armies and planes and tanks on a tactic. Then 10 years later, a targeted, police-style action took the guy out.

And in the intervening years, we re-fought Iraq, killed hundreds of thousands of people, abused and raped prisoners in Sadam Husseins rape-rooms while fighting a war based on no real discernable reason, other than the yelling of get them THERE to keep them from HERE. We willingly ceded a hundred civil liberties in the exchange for a false sense of patriotism and safety and condemned those who balked at this as weak and hippies and hand-wringers.

So yeah, when a small, elite force finally tracked this piece of shit down and shot him in the head, I too had a visceral “Yeah! Fuck him!” reaction and a sense of “Finally, good.”

But all this back-patting and self-congratulating and anthem singing and flag-waving is kind of crazy, with any sort of glance back at what was done, ostensibly in pursuit of this moment, that had nothing to do with this moment.

If it helps keep Mitt Romney out of the White House, and Paul Ryan out of policy-making, then I’m very glad for the political capital of it, but I don’t pretend that this is my country’s finest moment.

The feeling I have is less congratulatory and more like the end of THE CAINE MUTINY: