Navy Seals killed the most wanted man in the world last night.  Feels good to type that.

In response to the news, President Obama delivered a live televised statement from The White House:

But you don't come to A Voice in the Wilderness for breaking news stories, you (hopefully) come for thoughtful commentary on the passing scene.  I have just that for your today.

Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Theological Seminary, posted this response to the death of Bin Laden and the moral/ethical/spiritual implications of his demise.

Give it a listen and feel free to share what you're thinking/feeling on this long-awaited day.

I'm sorry, but he is.  Watch this exchange he had with a congressman during a hearing this last week on the recent slew of terrorist attacks (and what common denominator they "might" all have):

Feel safer, knowing this guy's the top law-man in the country right now?

Mark Steyn doesnt, and here are his thoughts on the matter.

The thwarted Times Square bombing a few weeks back has deservedly garnered much attention from the media and political leaders in New York City and Washington D.C.  But amidst the appropriate levels of coverage this story has been given, we witness an all-too-familiar (and dis-heartening) trend: the inability, or more likely, unwillingness, of so many prominent public figures to correctly identify Islamic terrorists when we see them.  

Talk show host, columnist, and fan-of-truth Dennis Prager has written what I consider to be one of the most important columns you will ever read in your life.  (How's that for an over-the-top build-up?)

While it cannot be proven, there is little reason to doubt that many on the Left are disappointed that the Times Square bomber didn't turn out to be the "white male" he was originally identified as.

This allegation may be wrong, but it is made on the basis of compelling evidence.  There is a perfectly clear pattern on the Left -- the normative Left, not just the "far" Left -- that denies the obvious when it comes to Islamic terrorism.

He continues:

Take, for example, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 fellow soldiers and tried to murder the 32 others whom he wounded at Fort Hood, Texas.  For days after the murders, liberal-Left commentators and mainstream media reports attributed Hasan's mass murders to everything but his Islamic beliefs -- even though it was known that he yelled out "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is the Greatest") just as he began his shooting.

As "Hardball's" Chris Matthews announced, "It's unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting," and then added, "He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaida ... That's not a crime, to call up al-Qaida, is it?"

The New York Times "Week in Review" article on the shootings was titled "When Soldiers Snap." As I wrote at the time, "The gist of the article was that Maj. Hasan had snapped -- even though he had never been in combat. He snapped in advance. Just two sentences in the article were devoted to the possibility that his motives were in any way relatable to his Muslim faith."

NPR'S Tom Gjelten offered the novel explanation that Hasan, who had never been in combat, may have suffered from "pre-traumatic stress disorder." Again, psychology, not religion.

On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera said, "I don't know what motivates him ... He could have had a toothache and gone off because of that."

That was then, back in November of last year, but what about this time around with the Times Square would-be bomber?

This time, the same thing happened, with one exception: For two days, it was assumed a "white male," shorthand for non-Muslim, non-minority American, tried to blow up passersby near Times Square in Manhattan.

New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this to Katie Couric on CBS News on May 3: "If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that, somebody who's homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something, it could be anything."

It's OK for liberals to speculate that a terrorist might be a Right-wing white American opposed to ObamaCare (aka a tea partier). It is the rather more likely scenario of an Islamic terrorist that liberals not consider, let alone publicly express.

I attribute the lack of intellectual honesty on the part of the media (and politicians such as Mayor Bloomberg) to three things:

1. People are rightly afraid of the physical harm that may befall them or their family for speaking out against militant Islamic terror.  Critics of the irreconcilable wing of Islam have been intimidated, threatened, and even assassinated all around the globe.  In light of this, and however much I disagree with it, I can completely understand a public figure's timidity in addressing the fact that while not every Muslim is a terrorist, nearly every terrorist we've encountered as a nation the past 20 years has been a Muslim.

2. Political correctness.  This cultural phenomena has already been eating away at the moral and intellectual fibers of this nation for some time now.  The bizarre obsession people who practice the Ways of PC have with being nice more than being right is itself a threat to our way of life in the West.  How can I say I love my family and country when I won't even publicly recognize the evil that seeks to destroy them?  Especially when my rationale for not public recognizing the evil is rooted in my desire to avoid being called "intolerant" by by other feckless people who are ignoring the same things I am, and for no more than the same petty reasons as mine?  You are not more moral or compassionate when you cover up the misdeeds of groups of people merely because they have darker skin complexions or foreign accents.

3. Political pandering to potential voters and current constituents.  Mayor Bloomberg has a city full of diverse ethnic heritages, and that is an awesome, American thing about a place like NYC.  But we need our leaders to protect us, first and foremost.  I don't care if my senator, congressman, mayor, or governor gets re-elected, no matter how much I may love his brand of politics, if he or she is unwilling to do everything in his/her power to keep me safe.  The media has a role in this as well, as they are supposed to be the gatekeepers of relevant and important information for the public.

Of course the explanation for why it is so many have tried to explain away the Muslim background of recent killers (and would-be mass murderers, in the case of the Time Sqaure nut) might be a combination of dozens of reasons, but the fact remains that when the press and high-ranking Center-Left officials discover that an attacker who is of the Islamic persuasion has conducted (or attempted) a terrorist attack on American soil, they bury the lead.

Just remember this: If Shahzad had not been identified as the would-be bomber, the mainstream (i.e., liberal) news media and leading Democrats would have told us repeatedly that a white male -- surely a conservative white male -- was the Times Square terrorist, and that we should therefore be looking suspiciously at our fellow Americans on the Right, especially those attending tea parties. For while liberals claim not to know the motives of Muslim terrorists, they are always certain of conservatives' motives: racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.

When, one day, the Left exits from history's stage, its epitaph will read: "Those who do not understand evil will not understand good."

Read the full column by Mr. Prager here.

In today's Times of London we read this:

Pakistani forces have taken control of a warren of caves that served until recently as the nerve centre of the Taleban and al-Qaeda and sheltered Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.

“It was the main hub of militancy where al-Qaeda operatives had moved freely,” Major-General Tariq Khan, the Pakistan regional commander, said as he gave journalists a tour of Damadola yesterday.

The village, nestling among snow-capped peaks in the Bajaur region along the Afghan border, has been fought over for 16 months. It is the first time that the Pakistani Army has set foot in the village, which had long been dominated by the insurgents operating on the both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Pakistan is by no means a stable nation, but we ought to praise our allies in the War on Terror when they score a victory for our "side".  There is REAL change in the attitude of the Pakistani military in terms of their willingness to help our efforts in Afghanistan. 

Here is more on Pakistan's role from The Heritage Foundation.

As one of my intellectual mentors Dennis Prager likes to say, "Clarity over unity."  In other words, we don't have to all agree...but we would do well to know what it is we disagree about, and why.  I've made it a goal to frequently post the columns of thinkers and writers on the Left here at AVITW.

Few political commentators better typify liberal-progressive thought and attitudes than Marueen Dowd of The New York Times.  Dowd has been a constant and persistent critic of all things George Bush and Dick Cheney since 2000, and, if her latest column is any indicator, the woman seems intent upon continuing her decade-long obsession.

She's not too happy with Dick Cheney going on different Sunday Morning Talk Shows to point out the current president's less-than-inspiring policies when it comes to terrorism, and has created a fictional, hypothetical dialogue between Obama, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates, and Cheney to vent out her frustrations.

Obama invited Bob Gates to the Saturday summit. Gates, after all, had originally been brought in as defense secretary by W. to be a common-sense counterbalance to the batty Cheney.

The president prides himself on winning over hostile audiences, but this challenge would give a peacock pause.

The three men sat before the fire in the Oval.

OBAMA: Look, Dick, you’ve called me out on various particulars. And I have no problem with that. That’s politics. You thought Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should not be tried in New York City, and that’s fine.

And we both know that any blowhard can call me weak. But you’re not just any blowhard, Dick. You were the architect of America’s defense against terrorism. And when those folks sitting in a cave in Waziristan hear you chest-thumping, saying our guard is down, they think, “Hey, this might be a good time to attack.”

You believe in the unitary executive. You believe that if the president says something is in the national security interest of the U.S., then it is. So I am the president now, and I’m telling you that you need to put a sock in it.

CHENEY: What are you going to do about it, Hussein? Mirandize me?

GATES: Dick, the president’s right. When a former vice president calls a new president weak, it emboldens terrorists.

CHENEY (contemptuously looking at Gates with his one-sided smile): If you take the king’s coin, you sing the king’s song.

OBAMA: You keep saying there were no terror attacks after 9/11, Dick. That’s like saying that blimps were safe after the Hindenburg. I wouldn’t have been caught flat-footed reading “The Pet Goat” to second graders.

CHENEY: No, you’d have been teaching a graduate seminar on “The Pet Goat.” Don’t you Muslims eat pet goats?

It continues on from there, which you can read here, but I suppose you get the gist of it.  Bush was/is dumb; Cheney is insensitive and "batty"; Obama is patient and non-ideological in his pragmatic benevolence.  (Note: If you just threw up a little bit in your mouth, don't worry...me too.)

Just like Howard Dean claiming after Scott Brown's election in MA last month that it was really a signal from the electorate to get socialized medicine passed even quicker, liberal columnists like Dowd seem incapable of accepting the fact that this is still a Center-Right nation.

This last quote from her piece sums up the mantra we will continue to hear for decades after Barack Obama fails to win re-election in 2012.

OBAMA: If I don’t get re-elected, it will be because you ruined the country beyond EVEN MY ABILITY to rescue it.

Writing at Slate.com, columnist Christopher Hitchens explains why the over-reaction to the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253 is preposterous.

In my boyhood, there were signs on English buses that declared, in bold letters, "No Spitting." At a tender age, I was able to work out that most people don't need to be told this, while those who do feel a desire to expectorate on public transport will require more discouragement than a mere sign. But I'd be wasting my time pointing this out to our majestic and sleepless protectors, who now boldly propose to prevent airline passengers from getting out of their seats for the last hour of any flight. Abdulmutallab made his bid in the last hour of his flight, after all.

Yes, that ought to do it. It's also incredibly, nay, almost diabolically clever of our guardians to let it be known what the precise time limit will be. Oh, and by the way, any passenger courageous or resourceful enough to stand up and fight back will also have broken the brave new law.

Well said.  To close out his exceptional column, Hitchens lays out the realities of the long war with the irreconcilable wing of Islam:

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets.

The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war," accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste. While we fumble with bureaucracy and euphemism, they are flying high.

We need to get serious about the enemy we face. More on that from Newt:

A picture, in this case, truly is worth a thousand words.

From Reuters:

A U.S. Army cadet reads a book entitled "Kill Bin Laden" as he waits with other cadets for U.S. President Barack Obama to deliver an address on U.S. policy and the war in Afghanistan at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York December 1, 2009.

Apparently the Germans don't think too highly of The One's speech either:

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric -- and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

I would be remiss if I did not post Charles Krauthammer's thoughts on the Fort Hood terrorist attack last week.

Chuck points out that the only people having a tough time describing Major Nidal Hasan as a Muslim jihadist are members of the media.

But, of course, if the shooter is named Nidal Hasan, whom National Public Radio reported had been trying to proselytize doctors and patients, then something must be found. Presto! Secondary post-traumatic stress disorder, a handy invention to allow one to ignore the obvious.

And the perfect moral finesse. Medicalizing mass murder not only exonerates. It turns the murderer into a victim, indeed a sympathetic one. After all, secondary PTSD, for those who believe in it (you won’t find it in DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), is known as “compassion fatigue.” The poor man — pushed over the edge by an excess of sensitivity.

Have we totally lost our moral bearings? Nidal Hasan (allegedly) cold-bloodedly killed 13 innocent people. In such cases, political correctness is not just an abomination. It’s a danger, clear and present.

He continues, discussing the warning signs that Maj. Hasan clearly exhibited to his colleagues in Maryland before being shipped to Fort Hood:

Was anything done about this potential danger? Of course not. Who wants to be accused of Islamophobia and prejudice against a colleague’s religion?

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar!” as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct, and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”

Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

The politically correct insanity that is crippling this country knows no bounds.  Within 24 hours of the terrorist attack on Fort Hood we knew that the suspect was named Nidal Malik Hasan, was a devout Muslim, spoke openly to his clients and colleagues alike about his radical Muslm views, had given copies of the Koran away to friends and neighbors the day before the murders took place, had been a member in social networking groups which extolled the virtues of suicide bombing, and, oh by the way, according to eye witness reports, had screamed "Allahu Akbar!" (God is Great!) before and during his rampage on the innocent victims in Texas.

And with all of that evidence, every liberal in America, from President Obama to Anderson Cooper to Homeland Security Chief Janet Napalitano, insisted that no one "jump to any conclusions."

Really?  Conclusions about what?  Not that the man might have been motivated by his perverted view of Islam to slaughter fellow soldiers, right?  Who would think such a thing?

Do you have any ketchup popsicles to sell me that might match my new white gloves?

But don't believe this sarcastic blogger that what happened at Fort Hood was most certainly terrorism.  From ABC News:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

The military knew this man was insane, and yet let him continue to be the person soldiers came to for counseling after fighting in a war that Hasan hated (only slightly more than Code Pink and the anti-war Left in this country).

I'm gonna let Mark Steyn take this blog-post home with an excerpt from his latest, and I dare say brilliant, column:

When it emerged early Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: "Please judge Maj. Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name."

Concerned tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that – and not just in the sense that the New York Times' first report on Maj. Hasan never mentioned the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or that ABC's Martha Raddatz's only observation on his name was that "as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'"

What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.

Honestly, this might be one of the most important articles you ever read.  Please finish Steyn's masterpiece right here.

President Obama has a lot on his plate right now, but his first and most important job is not community organizing, but nation protecting. He needs to make some decisions on what he plans to do in Afghanistan, the war that he said we "ignored" in favor of Iraq during the last administration's time in office.

It is more than worth winning the war in Afghanistan.  We need to find the right levels of spending to make our military work.  The Heritage Foundation put this chart together to track defense spending over the past 40 years:

Again, I completely understand the immense pressure and responsibilities President Obama has to deal with, but this is what presidents are expected to do: make tough decisions.  They don't just give flowery speeches trying to sell public option health care to union workers in Ohio, or grant soft-ball interviews to ABC and Telemundo.