Northwest Indiana Discussion

Clint Eastwood thinks that President Obama has taken too much credit for Osama bin Laden’s death, he recently said in an interview with Esquire.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” Eastwood told the mag a month before his “empty chair” speech at the Republican National Convention. “‘I’ people and ‘we’ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‘we’ person. I think that our president is an ‘I’ person. He speaks as though he killed Osama bin Laden himself.”

Eastwood, a legendary actor and director who was once the mayor of Carmel, Calif., suggested the president was in love with power.

“Can you imagine being him, surrounded by people all the time?” Eastwood said. “I’d hate it. But he seems to like it. He seems to like what I’d hate, all the trappings of power. He said that if he failed in his first term he wouldn’t seek a second. Well, here he is — unemployment’s still up around 8 percent — and he’s doing anything he possibly can to keep power. There’s no way he’s going to give it up.”

Americans think al Qaeda is more scared of Mitt Romney than President Obama, according to a new poll released Wednesday.

Romney leads on the “scary to terrorists” question 39 to 37 percent, according to the poll conducted by Langer Research for Esquire/Yahoo! News.

But it is a surprising result, since the successful Navy SEAL mission that resulted in the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden happened last year, under Obama’s watch. The survey also found that more Americans trust Obama than Romney “to commit the U.S. to war.” Obama leads Romney 46 to 37 percent in the survey response.

ODS conservatives STILL can't get over that Barry got bin Laden.

Next season they can run an episode showing Obama giving approval for the successful operation. Not that the voters will need reminders when they decide who to vote for in 2012. Four more years!

In an adaptation from his new book, The Finish—first reported for Vanity Fair—magazinecontributing editor Mark Bowden reveals that President Obama intended to put Osama bin Laden on trial in the federal court system if he had been captured, rather than killed, during the Abbottabad raid. Bowden had access to key players including C.I.A. deputy director Michael Morell and the president himself.

According to Bowden in the story—in November’s Vanity Fair—in the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial, which Attorney General Eric Holder had planned for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This time, the president tells Bowden, he was prepared to bring bin Laden back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III.” Obama continues: “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

“And it is because of the progress I’ve witnessed that after nearly four years as President, I am hopeful about the world we live in. The war in Iraq is over, and our troops have come home. We have begun a transition in Afghanistan, and America and our allies will end our war on schedule in 2014. Al Qaeda has been weakened and Osama bin Laden is no more. Nations have come together to lock down nuclear materials, and America and Russia are reducing our arsenals. I’ve seen hard choices made – from Naypyidaw to Cairo to Abidjan – to put more power in the hands of citizens.”