The debate over whether or not Barack Obama should be using the death of Osama bin Laden as a political "win" has come full circle from finger wagging to angry sniping to "absolutely, yes."

The pendulum has swung back in the other direction with the help of The New York Times' Ross Douthat (hardly an Obama apologist) who declared that duh, of course, military raids are political. After all, it's what separates presidents from the rest of us and the current Commander-in-Chief would be guilty of "political malpractice" if he didn't push his advantage. Per Douthat:

How can we not politicize national security, given how central it is to the work of the modern presidency, and how unconstrained the executive branch’s national security powers have become no matter which party holds the White House?

Amy Davidson over at The New Yorker agrees that the GOP should be engaging the debate, not shutting it down since Americans have spent the last ten years dancing around the sensitive issues of terrorism and freedom, with the result being that we've completely ignored the most essential questions of what it even means to live here:

The list of questions that we have had to confront practically, not just abstractly, reads like a catechism of citizenship. When should we go to war? What are the limits of habeas corpus? What are our priorities—financial, moral, military—as a nation? What are the rights of citizens, and of strangers? What do Congress, the Court, and the President each get to decide? How much can we know about what they do? Is torture worth it? What are my rights? Should we sneak into South Asian countries and assassinate our enemies in the middle of the night? These are all matters for politics.

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Dashiell Bennett