“A good start.”

Bad, old jokes aside:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Bush War on Terror was never about hunting down bin Laden. To view it in that light is to characterize it as a campaign of retribution rather than one of pre-emptive self defense. It is a simplistic and reductionist misrepresentation favored primarily by those who opposed Bush in every fashion, and it’s a straw man that we would all do well to stop stuffing.

Some people make the world better through their existence, some make it worse, and the vast majority of us largely break even. Osama bin Laden was clearly in the ‘worse’ column, and in that sense the world is a better place with him a corpse. But to claim that his death in any measurable way makes us safer or surer or more just is folly.