Saturday, May 7, 2011

Something is Rotten in D.C.

Hamlet's Father's  Ghost“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Marcellus says it after seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the deceased king of Denmark.

No one has claimed to see Osama Bin Laden’s ghost wafting about, but when liberal jurist Alan Dershowitz and Conservative columnist Wesley Pruden both detect a stench, it is cause for thought.

In a recent column, Pruden asserts that only Barack Obama could have made such a hash out of announcing a military coup. Apparently the administration could not wait to learn the facts before rushing to turn military heroism into political advantage. One would think that if a story was to be concocted, it should at least have been the same story. But John Brennan, the president’s anti-terrorism chief, (who may have missed his calling as a fiction writer), apparently did not get that memo.

Dershowitz’s problem is not with the dueling stories, but with the rush to dispose of the body. In Dershowitz’s view, “burying his body at sea constituted the willful destruction of evidence.” In a recent WSJ essay Dershowitz pointed out that the body should have been subjected “to the usual forensic testing,” Dead bodies, he wrote, “often talk more loudly, clearly and unambiguously than live witnesses.”

Clarity, however, has never been the hallmark of this administration.

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