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I’m still parsing what I think about this, but I have some initial responses.

• I cannot agree with the President when he says that “justice has been done.” Justice is not and can never be merely an event. Justice is a process, a daytime process. The path of justice is not illuminated by muzzle flashes in the darkness. What was announced last night might be a military victory and an intelligence success. It might even be a great victory and a great success. But I fear the implications of naming it justice.
• While I am opposed to capital punishment, the killing of Osama bin Laden does not fully engage with those political beliefs. I am not an absolute pacifist. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I was supportive of military engagement in Afghanistan. As it happens, that engagement was severely mishandled, then all but forgotten while another utterly pointless war was waged, and finally resumed with focus under a drastically different and more fraught geopolitical circumstance. But I believe that military pursuit of people responsible for attacks against civilian targets within our major cities is appropriate. Seen as a military action against an unprovoked aggressor, rather than an act of retributive justice, the killing of Osama bin Laden has a degree of propriety.
• The killing of Osama bin Laden would have more than just a degree of propriety if the primary goal had been to capture him and actually bring him to justice. That is, bring him to a place where he could be tried and undoubtedly convicted for his crimes. Reuters reports that this was not the case. The operation was a “kill mission;” capture was never the goal. This complicates evaluating the propriety of the act.  The position of the government for the last decade was that Osama bin Laden needed to be “caught or killed,” so his death was always a potential goal. But having made no attempt at capture opens the President to the accusation that the political gain of eliminating such a widely hated figure was valued more highly than the systematized pursuit of justice. Combined with the President’s willingness to claim that this is justice done, I am again troubled.
• Though I find the direction of leadership questionable and somewhat troubling, I find the effectiveness heartening. A decade of failure at what was repeatedly claimed as the government’s highest military goal had led me to feel there was an essential, pervasive ineptitude to our intelligence and military infrastructure. Now I have the option of viewing the mission to “capture or kill” Osama bin Laden as not a decade-long failure, but as a success that took 2.5 years once our armed forces were being commanded by a competent President. Reducing the scope of government ineptitude from systemic to individual leaves a wide enough crack in my cynical door to let in some optimism.
• On the propriety of people celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death: it is understandable, and easily forgivable, and wrong. A small wrongness that is not at all worth the spiral of recriminations and defensiveness that I suspect will be the result. The last decade has been an exercise, on a social level, of catering to and encouraging our basest natures and fears. Security theater has become ubiquitous, rights have been adulterated, and tens of thousands of lives have been lost. Though marrying retributive and celebratory urges is an obscenity, it is far less of an obscenity than mass murder. Osama bin Laden’s death is validly cathartic for many, and caring overmuch about how that catharsis finds expression is a waste of energy.
• What is not a waste of energy: remembering that this victory, to the extent that it is a victory, is a purely symbolic one. One horrible person is dead. As was shown so clearly with Saddam Hussein, a death is not, in any lastingly meaningful way, a mission accomplished.  Just as justice is a process, so is safety, and so is peace. Osama bin Laden was not the dragon hiding in his den, and Happily Ever After does not begin now that he is dead. This is not a story. Something is done, but nothing is easier.

Meanwhile, discussion of violent rhetoric is still the order of the day.  Scott Eric Kaufmann laments that the term is being used seemingly detached from it’s meaning, and has provided a thorough definition.

Finally, Sarah Palin is an idiot.  Having the opportunity to validly criticize those who are attempting to directly tie her to Jared Loughner, she instead hands everyone something new and completely legitimate to lambaste her for.  She has described the things being said about her as “blood libel.”  Because being told that you use inflammatory speech is a lot like being accused of secretly murdering babies.  My favorite commentary on this so far comes from Patton Oswalt, who tweets, “There’s a veritable Holocaust of cream cheese on this bagel. #palin” and by John Scalzi who explores other applications of the Palin Equivalence Filter.

I don’t have further commentary of my own at this time, and as this is the top story in everyone’s mind there are editorials and articles and analysis in all the usual places.  We all know where those are and I’m not going to rehash them.  But there are some other people who I think are saying worthwhile things that I want to link to.

• First, commentary from Scott Eric Kaufmann, a professor of rhetoric, back in February of 2010, after the murder of George Tiller.  ”Rhetoric  amounts to more than what you advocate.“
• Christopher Bird’s balanced analysis, drawing a line through this and several other recent violent events. “On The Shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.”
• Abi Sutherland has a deeply pessimistic but interestingly distanced view of the current climate of political discourse, which he equates to the tragedy of the commons.  ”I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep.“

Finally, there’s a small weird personal thing I want to point to, though I don’t really like it.  Yesterday I got an automated congratulatory message for being a “trend setter.” This turns out to be because I was the first person in my geographical area to tweet about Gabrielle Giffords.  I find something about this impersonal message, and the contrast between the content and the context, fairly unsettling.  There’s probably some interesting nuance here, but I don’t really care to try to unpack it right now.  So I’m just going to note it in case I want to return to it later.

It is also coming to light that Giffords was the target of violent rhetoric by Tea Party groups.  Sarah Palin, until taking it down today, had a map online with a gunsight over Gifford’s district and those of several other democratic candidates for the Tea Party to target for defeat.  (The map has been removed from Palin’s site since the shooting.)  Giffords’s political opponent in the last election, Jesse Kelly,  held a “Target for Victory” rally during the campaign that involved shooting fully automatic M16s with the candidate.  And Gifford’s has been the target of violence and death threats before.

As all of the examples of violent rhetoric began streaming across Twitter, I responded by tweeting, “Chastising Palin et al. for inflammatory rhetoric: appropriate. Assuming things about motive behind actual shooting: too early.”  I’d like to expand on that here.

First: the rhetoric is execrable.  It is execrable independent of any specific details of this attempted assassination.  What makes it so unconscionable is that it lowers the activation energy required for people to become radicalized to violent or terroristic acts.  In her thorough and marvelous book What Terrorists Want, terrorism researcher Louise Richardson writes:

It is simply baffling that someone with a background no different from many others’ and a great deal more privileged than most would choose to become a terrorist.  In attempting to understand the causes of terrorism, one must look for explanations at the level of the individual, such as Omar Sheikh, but that is not enough.  Explanations are found at national and transnational levels too.  The emergence of terrorism requires a lethal cocktail with three ingredients: a disaffected individual, an enabling group, and a legitimizing ideology.

Even without explicitly advocating violent activity, by using the rhetoric of violence against their political opponents the Tea Party positions itself to be the enabling group, and perhaps provide the legitimizing ideology, for people sufficiently deranged to radicalize in our highly privileged society.  It is not necessary to openly call for violence to facilitate it, and the Tea Party does.  It needs to stop.

The second part, though, is about our responses to shocking and horrible events.  In this case, directly blaming the Tea Party for the shooting is not yet called for.  All the criticisms I just leveled against them were equally true yesterday.  Meanwhile, the shooter is in custody and we can expect the details of his motivations to come out; making assumptions doesn’t further intelligent discourse, and blaming Sarah Palin for Gifford’s death (I’ve seen multiple messages to this end) is overly reductive — and that’s ignoring the fact that she (thankfully, luckily) isn’t dead.  There will be all the time in the world for anger, for grieving, for recriminations.  But in the absence of detail, let our initial responses be shock and pity and remorse that such things happen, and not to seek in a knowledge vacuum for our own target for blame.

More on this topic as details emerge.

• The very best thing to happen recently is Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning prop 8 and granting homosexuals the right to marry in California.  The whole decision can be downloaded here, but there are articles all over the place dissecting the good bits.  The most important part, though, is this:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Thank you, Judge Walker, for doing your job well.  And, as C. E. Petit notes, for being willing to take a correct position that will probably make you permanently unable to ever be confirmed to an appellate court.

• It is not a good thing at all that Christopher Hitchens has esophageal cancer which has metastasized and will likely soon kill him.  But his essay in Vanity Fair on the experience of learning about it and getting treatment is as powerful as anything he’s written.  Speaking simultaneously about the side effects of chemotherapy and the militaristic language which is so frequently used when discussing cancer, he writes, “In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.”  It’s a piece well worth reading.  “Tropic of Cancer.”

• Charles Stross has been thinking some very clever thoughts about the hard limitations of space colonization.  Most recently he has written an excellent explanation of why the practice is fundamentally incompatible with libertarian ideology.  It’s an important reality check against having read too much Heinlein.  (And yeah, I love me some Heinlein, but that joke is spot-on.)

• RadioLab is one of the best programs on the radio, and lately they are increasingly on the internet as well.  To go with a recent podcast they have released a beautiful video exploring the concept of a moment.  Utterly lovely.

But Tom Barber, who worked as the head of social studies at the three biggest textbook publishers before running his own editorial company, says, “Texas was and still is the most important and most influential state in the country.” And James Kracht, a professor at Texas A&M’s college of education and a longtime player in the state’s textbook process, told me flatly, “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.”

This only a local election with regard to who gets to vote in it.  McLeroy needs to go.  There are 19 days left.  Here’s the opposition movement website again: District 9 Citizens for a Smart State Board of Education.

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

This sentence is now a part of the state’s constitution.  So it is to be supposed that, for any existing marriages to be legal under Texas law, one must somehow make the argument that traditional marriage is neither similar nor identical to itself.

How I dearly wish Molly Ivins was around for this one.

EDITED TO ADD: For a sense of who Molly Ivins was, and for how absurd things sometimes get on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives, I recommend this nine minute excerpt from the documentary Dildo Diaries about the bizarre doublethink nonsense that underlies our state’s sex toy laws.  Which actually seem comparatively sane in light of this marriage thing. (Probably NSFW.)