College Kids Were Right to Cheer Osama's Death

Maureen Dowd has no patience for the hand-wringing going on over the Osama bin Laden raid. "The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same," she writes at the New York Times. This was the leader of a terrorist group, after all, who had not only murdered thousands of Americans, and bragged about it, but was planning yet more attacks from his Pakistan hideaway. "We have nothing to apologize for."

"Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently," writes Dowd. So enough with these comparisons of the revelers outside the White House with those who celebrated the 9/11 attacks. The latter "were applauding the slaughter of American innocents," she writes. "When college kids spontaneously streamed out Sunday night to the White House, ground zero and elsewhere, they were the opposite of bloodthirsty: they were happy that one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time was no more." (More Osama bin Laden stories.)