Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber convicted of killing 270 and diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2008, was released in August of 2009 under compassionate grounds (where’s the compassion toward the victims?) due to “a Scottish law that allows terminally ill prisoners to die at home. When he was freed, Mr. Megrahi was expected to live three months.”

Instead of 3 months, he enjoyed almost 3 years of freedom, not including the 3 years it took before he was indicted, 8 more years before Qaddafi surrendered him for trial, followed by 2 more years before conviction on 2001.

All in all, he lived 22 years longer than the 259 unfortunates aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the 11 on ground; and 7 months longer than Qaddafi. A peaceful end in contrast to their violent deaths:

On Dec. 21, 1988, a bronze hard-shell Samsonite suitcase was loaded onto an Air Malta plane bound for Frankfurt. From Germany, the suitcase was transferred onto a flight to London. Upon arrival, the bag was placed inside the forward cargo bay of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Bound for New York, Pan Am Flight 103 held 189 Americans, including a group of Syracuse University college students returning home for the holidays from a semester abroad.

The jet was cruising at 31,000 feet at 7:03 p.m. when a bomb hidden inside the Samsonite bag exploded. All 259 aboard died, and 11 people on the ground were killed when flaming chunks of the plane plummeted into the bucolic village of Lockerbie.

~~~

When he arrived in Tripoli in 2009, he was greeted by hundreds of jubilant Libyans, including some who wore shirts depicting his face. Others in the crowd waved Scottish flags, an apparently taunting gesture.

He earned a reputation as a national hero, and babies were reportedly named after him. He was granted an exclusive audience with Gaddafi.

The decision to allow his release enraged many of the families of Lockerbie bombing victims. President Obama called Mr. Megrahi’s release “a mistake.”

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was born April 1, 1952, in Tripoli. He studied in the United States during the 1970s and spoke fluent English. He received an engineering degree from Benghazi University in Libya.

Survivors include his wife, Aisha, and five children.

At home in Libya for the past two years, Mr. Megrahi lived in a resplendent villa in Tripoli, complete with a garden and swimming pool.

Until his death, Mr. Megrahi maintained his innocence, claiming that he was the victim of an international conspiracy.

“You judge me falsely,” Mr. Megrahi once told an American interviewer. “My life is clean.”

What if he were innocent? Unfortunately, the secrets and details of the plot to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 probably dies with Qaddafi and Megrahi.

Seattle Times:

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, al-Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Gadhafi was overthrown and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter of a century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians and Libyans.

The enigmatic al-Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Al-Megrahi was also a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

U.S. intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, al-Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America.

~~~

While they had no direct proof, investigators believed the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion.

Al-Megrahi lived under armed guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999 — the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb.

But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified al-Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that al-Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found al-Megrahi guilty but acquitted Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of al-Megrahi. Much of the evidence, however, was later challenged as unreliable.

It emerged that Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Koechler, a U.N. observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” words echoed by Mandela. Many legal experts, authors and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling al-Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism.

A boy stands stands in front of the main headstone in the Lockerbie memorial garden in Lockerbie, Scotland. Families of victims of the 1988 bombing stood sharply divided over reports that the former Libyan agent jailed for life for the attack is to be freed. David Moir-Reuters

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I cannot think of a better description of Andrew:

Andrew Breitbart was the Right’s Achilles; the bravest of all the warriors

One of our readers shared her own experience with Andrew which sums up what he did best, waving the red cape in front of them all:

A friend of Andrew called him and said that ACORN was protesting at a local bank. Andrew told his friend “Meet me there.” Andrew parked his car and went to the back of it, lifting the trunk lid. He took out a pair of roller blades, and put them on. When he friend asked what he was doing, Andrew said “Going into the crowd.” Andrew, on roller blades, video camera in hand, went among the ACORN protesters, filming them as he asked them why they were there. No one seemed to know. They just knew that ACORN HQs had called them and told them to protest the bank. They also did not seem to know who he was.

The man was fearless and tireless. He took the fight to our opponents, on their territory, and gave them every opportunity to fight back. More often then not he beat them. That is no small feat with the MSM stacked against the right.

I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies. Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.

And boy, will he be missed.

Rest in peace Andrew.

Hasta La Vista Kim Baby!

Kim Jung Il’s life: a soliloquy in lunacy and madness.

Often the sages admonish
Oh Death, be not so proud
A tender soul’s last wish
The welfare of others be allowed

Death unkind, strikes indiscriminate
History records with only a wretched few
Death comes not soon enough to elate
The drop of his miserable carcass in its tomb

This could well be a scripted scene from a remake of Orwell’s 1984:

This is a more realistic response.

The world awaits the apparent madness of the heir apparent and the ubiquitous and fawning attention by our State Department to insure adequate supplies for the country and an effortless transition of power from one totalitarian despot to another, like when we aided Kim and his transition of ultimate Nepotism.

From the pen of Hitchens, 2005:

One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell’s 1984was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. (“Hmmm … good book. Let’s see if we can make it work.”)

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell’s dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no “free-world” propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Kim, Rest In Hell, you evil bastard!

Brittney Murray and Hero sit by Justin's grave. Murray took the lead in trying to bring Hero to the United States. Bill O'Leary / WASHINGTON POST

..and Tissue-alert story of the day:

This was as close as Hero the dog had been to her old buddy Justin since they were photographed together in 2007. In that picture, they were snout-to-chest, a 23-year-old soldier cuddling a weeks-old stray puppy in Samarra, Iraq. But Wednesday, Hero could get no nearer than six feet, a grown dog snuffling above a grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

~~~

Dog and soldier took very different paths to Arlington. On March 5, 2007, one day after he befriended the puppy, Army Spec. Rollins was killed by a massive roadside bomb. Two weeks later, he was here in Section 60.

Hero’s trip was longer and stranger. It started when an Iraqi soldier waved over Rollins and his unit to see something interesting outside a police station. It was a litter of dusty blond puppies, sleeping in an old upturned outhouse.

A group of the men jumped at the chance to fraternize with some local critters. Rollins in particular was a self-professed animal nut, with a beloved pit bull sleeping on his bed in New Hampshire and a history of rescuing strays. When his unit was sent to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he got dozens of abandoned dogs into shelters.

The guys passed around the Iraqi pups, snapped a bunch of pictures. Later that night, Rollins called his girlfriend back home and told her to expect some very cute photos from him the next day. That e-mail never arrived.

“We never heard from Justin again,” Rhonda says.

When they did see the pictures, sent by one of his buddies, they were entranced: Justin nose to nose with a brown-eared pup; Justin cradling the one with a patch over its eye. His joy was palpable.

“It was so wonderful to see how happy he was,” Rhonda says. “Those were his last happy moments.”

When his flag-draped transfer case arrived at an airfield in New Hampshire, an Army general asked the family members if there was anything he could do for them.

As a matter of fact, there was.

“I want one of those puppies,” Rhonda answered immediately.

The officer nodded and said they would be glad to get her any kind of dog she liked. No, Rhonda said, she wanted one of those dogs. From the pictures. Justin’s dogs. She already had a box full of his personal effects, but she knew his dog could provide something his dog tags couldn’t — an armful of her son’s loving warmth.

Read the article.

After her request for the dog was turned down several times by the Army, Murray contacted local newspapers and then congressional offices. Bill O'Leary / WASHINGTON POST

“The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”-Muhammad Ali

March 8, 1971 Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Marcante after knocking down Muhammad Ali during the 15th round of the title bout at Madison Square Garden in New York. AP

One of the finest boxing legends of the modern era has passed away:

Joe Frazier, 67, the former heavyweight boxing champion who was known for his fighting spirit, powerful punch and intense rivalry with Muhammad Ali, died Monday night in a hospice in Philadelphia. He had been suffering from liver cancer.

As a heavyweight in all senses of the word, Mr. Frazier was one of the best known champions of the latter decades of the 20th century.

While at the top of the heavyweight ranks, the elite of boxing, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Frazier, who went by the sobriquet of Smokin’ Joe, was known for his knockout punch.

In more than two dozen fights, Mr. Frazier’s ferocious, brawling, slugging style sent his foes to the canvas for the full count.

Among boxing fans, and connoisseurs of popular culture, his bouts with Ali have become enshrined in memory. He was the first to defeat Ali in the ring. It happened in New York’s Madison Square Garden, long the world’s capital of prizefighting.

The contest went the full 15 rounds, neither able to dispatch the other, in what was described in the hyperbole of the sports world as the Fight of the Century.

In all they had four fights, and in one of them, the “Thrilla in Manila,” they outdid their previous efforts for the title.

In that 1975 slugfest, Ali emerged the victor when Mr. Frazier could not answer the bell for the final round.

In addition to his legendary battles with Ali, Mr. Frazier was also known for two fights with George Foreman. In the first, Foreman took his title from him.

But the rivalry with Ali was what he was better known for, a kind of face-off in the ring and outside it, that emphasized the contrasting styles and personalities of both men.

With a less flamboyant and engaging image than Ali’s Mr. Frazier seemed far less expressive, possessed of a stolid ruggedness of a hard-working man who let his fists and his dedication speak for him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More from the AP:

he also was the only American fighter to win a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He was the heavyweight champ from February 1970 to January 1973, an era when that crown truly meant something. He was beloved as an adopted son of Philadelphia, embodying the city’s blue-collar grit.

And when the last round of his final fight ended Monday night, reaction to Frazier’s death poured in from every corner of the sports world.

“Good night Joe Frazier. I love you dear friend,” former heavyweight champion George Foreman, who stopped Frazier to win the title, posted to his Twitter account.

WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao said boxing lost “a great champion” and “a great ambassador.”

And it wasn’t only other boxers who were touched by Frazier. Tennis star Serena Williams called him an icon and a pioneer.

“Inspiring and loved. Your presence will be missed,” she tweeted.

Don King, who promoted the steamy fight in the Philippines that became known as the Thrilla in Manila, was described by a spokesman as too upset to talk about Frazier’s death.

WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins, a fellow Philadelphia fighter, said Frazier was so big in the city that he should have his own statue, like the fictional Rocky character.

“There’s no way in the world you should come to Philadelphia and not recognize who Joe Frazier is. It’s the perfect time to build the biggest statue in appreciation for all the heart and love he gave to Philadelphia,” Hopkins said. “It’s just to say how we regret when it’s not there to touch and see. We didn’t realize we had a super special person amongst us that we all in a way took for granted. I said this when he was living, I say this now. That’s the only thing.”

Bob Arum, who once promoted Ali, said the famous bout in the Philippines was “the greatest fight in the history of boxing.”

“Joe Frazier should be remembered as one of the greatest fighters of all time and a real man. He’s a guy that stood up for himself. He didn’t compromise and always gave 100 percent in the ring. There was never a fight in the ring where Joe didn’t give 100 percent,” Arum said.

Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, who hold all the major heavyweight belts, paid respect to Frazier on Tuesday.

“My brother and I are very sad about the death of Joe Frazier,” said Vitali Klitschko, the elder of the two brothers and the WBC champion. “He was one of the really great heavyweights. He was a great champion and Joe did a lot for the sport of boxing through his social engagements.”

Wladimir Klitschko is the WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight champion.

Former German heavyweight Axel Schulz also praised Frazier.

“He marked the gigantic era of heavyweight in the 1970s. The news made me incredibly sad,” Schulz told the German news agency dapd. “I was shocked by how fast it all went.”

The heavyweight champion’s life and career: Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight champion who handed Muhammad Ali his first defeat, died Nov. 7 after a fight with liver cancer. He was 67.

Very sad news to report from California today. Apple has confirmed that Steve Jobs has died after an extended illness.

For all the happiness.

For all the smiles.

For all the wide-eyed wonder that you brought into our lives.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs.

Our thoughts, and our prayers go out to his family, his friends, and his employees.

A stellar example of the American dream.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Baltimore Sun photo by Chien-Chi Chang

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Medal of Honor didn’t exist because there were no wars and we could all live in peace?’’-Paul J. Wiedorfer, WWII Medal of Honor Recipient

Born July 17, 1921 in Baltimore, he was the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor recipient in Maryland and died at the age of 89 this past Wednesday from heart failure at Loch Raven Community Living and Rehabilitation Center.

Part of his story...

Like so many of his countrymen, Mr. Wiedorfer didn’t seem the heroic type. He was working at a responsible job for Baltimore Gas & Electric in the early years of World War II, and, because it was a war industry, he didn’t go into the Army until 1943. He ended up in Europe, in the long, bloody slog to Germany that followed D-Day.

Assigned to Company G, 318th Infantry, 80th Division, his unit was part of General George S. Patton Jr.’s Third Army. They were sent in to rescue American troops who were trapped in Bastogne, Belgium; and on Christmas Day, 23 year-old Wiedorfer saw combat for the first time…

On Christmas Day 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Wiedorfer’s platoon was ambushed in Belgium by two concealed German machine gun emplacements. Pinned down, helpless, the unit seemed in danger of suffering heavy casualties, when Mr. Wiedorfer took the initiative. “I was probably a little nuts when I did it,” he told the Baltimore Sun in an interview a half-century later. “But someone was going to die if something didn’t get done.” He ran as best he could across a 120-foot stretch of open, snow-covered ground toward the guns. “Miraculously escaping injury,” as his medal citation put it, he got to within 10 yards of the first machine gun nest, threw in a hand grenade, and shot and killed the three German soldiers manning the gun. He then attacked the other gun, killing one of its crew. Six more quickly surrendered to him.

Wiedorfer was given a battlefield promotion to sergeant that afternoon. Minutes later, he had to assume command when his platoon’s leader and sergeant were wounded.

Less than two months later, in Germany, Mr. Wiedorfer was badly wounded by mortar fire. The soldier next to him, Pfc. Milton C. Smithers of Huntingdon, N.J., took the brunt of the explosion and was killed.

According to the Baltimore Sun:

Three days before V-E Day on May 8, 1945, Mr. Wiedorfer, who was 24, was recuperating at the 137th U.S. Army General Hospital in England from severe wounds he suffered in a mortar attack while crossing the Saar River earlier that year.

In the attack, a fellow infantryman near Mr. Wiedorfer, who was a staff sergeant, was killed instantly by an exploding mortar shell. Shrapnel ripped into Mr. Wiedorfer’s stomach, broke his left leg and riddled his right. Two fingers on his right hand were seriously injured.

“That was Feb. 10, 1945. The sergeant’s back was blown wide open, and he was dead when he hit the ground. I was just lucky, I guess,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I spent more than three years in hospitals recovering from those wounds.”

Another patient was reading Stars and Stripes when an item caught his eye, and he asked Mr. Wiedorfer, “How do you spell your name?”

“It really was funny,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I said, ‘W-i-e-d-o-r-f-e-r,’ and he said, ‘You just got a medal.’ I said was it the Bronze Star, and he said no, ‘Congressional Medal of Honor.’

“To be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t really sure what the hell it was, because all I was was some dogface guy in the infantry,” he told the newspaper.

“All the officers and nurses were wearing their Class A uniforms and there was a band. Gen. E.F. Koening came into the ward and presented the medal,” he recalled. “I really was embarrassed by all the fuss.”

He was made to give a “little speech” and said he was so nervous because he had never given a speech before in his life (and apologized to the mayor for getting his name wrong).

Here is the full text of his Medal of Honor citation. In addition, Wiedorfer was also awarded 2 Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star.

A little more:

He separated from the military in 1947 as a master sergeant and was a power station operator with Baltimore Gas and Electric when he retired in 1981.

In the early 1990s, a man came to Mr. Wiedorfer’s home and offered to polish his Medal of Honor. The man took the authentic medal from its ceremonial shadow box and replaced it with an imitation. Mr. Wiedorfer’s stolen medal was returned to him in 1995. Stephen Pyne, who was charged with the theft, was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Mr. Wiedorfer’s wife, the former Alice Stauffer, died in 2008. A daughter, Nancy Mazer, died in 2010.

Survivors include three children, Randee Wiedorfer of Parkville, Md., Paul J. Wiedorfer Jr. of Baltimore and Gary Wiedorfer of Cocoa, Fla.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

As he aged, Mr. Wiedorfer said he prayed for the day there would be no living recipients of the Medal of Honor.

“Because,” he once said, “it will mean that we have learned to live in peace.”

Today, 84 recipients remain.

Mark Daily relaxes on the rooftop of an Army combat operations base in Mosul in January. (Daily family photo)

I blogged about Mark Daily before after hearing his story on the Hugh Hewitt Show and reading his “Why I joined” statement. (Also here). I also included several images of him in my 2007 tribute video.

His friend, Matt Gallagher, writing in the NYTimes, reflects back upon that MySpace essay of Mark’s, this Memorial Day:

Before he deployed with the First Cavalry Division, Mark posted a brief statement on his MySpace page, titled “Why I Joined.” The entire piece resonates even today, in a post-surge America and post-Awakening Iraq, because it puts on display the type of individual that made these movements work in the first place. “Consider that there are 19-year-old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest,” Mark wrote, “who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.” Mark channeled idealism into action in a manner that seemed natural to him, but remains all too rare in our modern world.

Why’d we sometimes disagree? He saw the best in people; I feared the worst. He was inspired by Hitchens; I called Hitchens a chicken hawk. Although he was sympathetic to antiwar statements and arguments regarding Iraq, he instead focused on the opportunity we had to instill democracy in the heart of the Middle East. I, uh, didn’t. Mark also became the first person to tell me to stop concerning myself with how we ended up in Iraq — it didn’t matter anymore — and to instead focus on what could be done since we were already there. And he was right. We were second lieutenants destined for the war regardless of our personal opinions, and the decisions made in 2003 were now as irrelevant to our lives as they were to the Iraqi people living in the midst of it all.

With the passage of time, and through my own deployment to Iraq, I’ve been able to focus on the good times with Mark: laughing about being covered head to toe in mud while fixing a tank track; ganging up on political fascists and berating them into intellectual submission; drinking beers at Irish pubs in Louisville, reminiscing about field exercises, talking about them like they were actual war stories. He was a driven mind, less of an oddball than me, and I genuinely liked and admired him — things that aren’t always the case with battle buddies.

In retrospect, I think that I was even a little jealous of Mark’s rugged optimism; young men like him weren’t supposed to exist anymore, except maybe in the minds of our Greatest Generation grandparents. But he did, and all of us who were there with him at Knox are better off because of it. Even then, we knew Mark to be the lieutenant we wanted our platoons to think we actually were. He set a high standard and gave us something to aspire to as leaders — something I suspect lingers in all of us, whether we’re still in the Army or not. I know that it remains the case for me.

See you at Fiddler’s Green, Mark.

I encourage readers to check out his “Why I Joined” essay. A bit more background on it from Teresa Watanabe writing for the LA Times, linked in my 2nd post, in 2007 (I believe this was around the time of the “Surrender” Resolution being debated in Congress, post 2006 midterms):

that essay, in recent weeks, has ricocheted throughout the Internet, taking on a life of its own. It was read on the U.S. Senate floor and posted on the websites of columnists and talk show hosts. It has prompted hundreds of letters from strangers. Daily’s words, his astonished parents say, seemed to resonate with all kinds of folks, stirring a common altruistic impulse.

He wrote it in just 20 minutes, his parents say, as he chatted with his family in his packed-up El Paso apartment near Ft. Bliss, Texas, where he was assigned to the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division.

John and Linda Daily pore over the hundreds of sympathy cards and letters they received after the death of their son Mark in Iraq. The response has filled them with a strange mix of grief, pain, gratitude and awe. (Wally Skalij / LAT)

I won’t politicize if you won’t, Mr. President.

President Obama does deserve credit as it happened on his watch. He’s made good on his campaign promise (really, it was only a matter of time before justice would catch up to al Qaeda’s #1 figurehead, a culmination of the last 9 years, not just the last 9 months). But it’s irksome that his narcissism can’t help but inject himself into this:

“Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground,” President Obama told the nation in a speech Sunday night.

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body,” he said.

Or maybe as a partisan, I’m far too sensitive and am reading more into it than is warranted. Of course President Obama had to green light the operation; but I seem to always feel like this president has a way of always making it all about him; of taking undue credit for things he had little to do with (yes, he gave the order; but what sitting president wouldn’t have? Actually, Clinton had opportunities and did not take them, so nix that). Even when he says, “it’s never been about me”, he inadvertently seems to make it otherwise.

President Obama deserves credit, whether he wants to claim it (and he does) or not. And I am glad he called his two predecessors to give them the news. The hunt did not begin on his watch but President Obama has seen it to through to its conclusion.

The real winners, of course, are the American people.

Finally setting aside partisan politics at the end of this partisan post, I’d like to say, thank you President Obama and congratulations for a job well done!

Josh Rogins offers a timeline (beginning with Obama’s decision-making for what led directly to this operation).