... buh-bye bin, bada bing ...

... a tip o' the tam to Tim for reminding me of the a propos quote, "I've never wished a man dead but I've read some obituaries with great pleasure” ... whether or not those words are wholely attributable to Mark Twain, they inspired me to vent on a vanquished villain, that surly Saudi ingrate, phantom renegade and bad egg by any measure ...

... Osama bin Laden was a larger-than-life, xtreme hide and seek player ... after being emboldened by Western support against the Soviets in Afghanistan he came to embody such a perfect foil for American psychologies of propriety that it's difficult not to feel elements of good riddance ... and this is before we even mention his most nefarious misdeeds ...

... enter the frontier sheriff on his sturdy steed, twirling ivory-handled Colts at the hip, down mainstreet Abbottabad ... Barack Obama, faced with mid-term poll recalibrations, second-term boo-birds, and long-term legacy considerations, pulls a six foot-five inch rabbit from his hat and trumps (literally - hah!) the relatively prosaic Saddam-in-a-hole routine of his predecessor ...

... the daring in this act of leadership is magnified by the timing ... fresh from being carded (which is effectively what happened when this President was compelled into taking special initiative to produce an obsolete form of bureaucratic paperwork testifying to his very legitimacy as citizen-of-the-land), Obama stewards a checkmate for the ages ... going from (not-quite) zero to sixty, in the political equivalent of a nanosecond ...

... the only foreshadowing precedent I can recall is the classic 1974 Mel Brooks spoof film "Blazing Saddles", and, based on the way things developed for the new-man-in-charge in that blueprint, I predict more quasi-comic moments and coolly managed scenarios, with only the occasional glitch, before this dude proudly hangs up his badge after about eight years leading the posse ... and rides off into the (Hawaiian?) sunset ...