So President Obama accomplished in a year and a half what George Bush couldn’t (or wouldn’t – more about that anon) achieve during two full terms in office. Unfortunately, ordering the Navy to hastily dump Bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean plays like an institutionally organized version of flushing your last baggie of Acapulco Gold down the toilet before your parents search your bedroom. Mr. Obama’s machinations seem only more furtive given his adamant refusal to release photos of the deceased. Yet the reason proffered – that the gruesome imagery would further incite Islamic terrorists – holds no sway given that the phony, yet sufficiently grisly picture sent as proof to members of Congress has already coursed its way throughout the Internet. Ironically, it is Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) who now claims “the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic,” while Anwar al Awlaki, for propaganda’s sake, vouches for its authenticity. Meanwhile, we Americans are supposed to be satisfied with the White House’s assertion of a DNA match and pacified by ceremonies at a midtown Manhattan firehouse and at Ground Zero. It remains for Donald Trump, then, to render the proof.

Strikingly, even hardened liberals like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) when out of their way to credit President Bush for his part in the ultimately successful hunt for the Al Qaeda mastermind. The House Minority Leader went so far as to phone the former president: “Earlier today, I called President Bush to congratulate him and to thank him for the leadership role that he had played in this quest over the years.” President Obama even invited Mr. Bush to participate in New York, but was rebuffed with the explanation that W would rather avoid the spotlight. Or perhaps, more aptly, avoid publically confronting his guilt. A cursory review of the events leading up to September 11th can leave no impression other than the administration had advance knowledge of the attacks and thwarted any attempt to prevent them. To wit: Two terrorists on the CIA’s watch list “couldn’t be located” even though they were listed in the San Diego phone book. Warrants were denied in the case against suspicious flight student Zacarias Moussaoui. FBI field agents were fired or told to cease investigations. Explicit warnings from both the French and Russian intelligence services as well as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice described every detail save the color of the hijackers’ carry-on luggage. No fighter jets were scrambled despite a multitude of mid-continent airliner U-turns (though two were dispatched to escort golfer Payne Stewart’s uncontrolled private plane to the ground).

The most widely accepted explanation is that Mr. Bush (and this part is pure conjecture) condoned the now infamous carnage to conjure a pretext for invading Iraq. Which made absolutely no sense given Al Qaeda had no ties to Saddam Hussein in the first place. Moreover, as the United States is nearly synonymous with attacking other countries on a whim (recall: Libya, Panama, Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Honduras, Korea, Bosnia, Guatemala, etc., etc.), the horrific events of that fateful day were indeed superfluous.

Perhaps reworking the facts in his head to some exculpatory end is why Mr. Bush repeatedly claimed to have seen the first plane hit the towers on television that fateful morning when in fact video of the initial strike didn’t surface until September 12th. But even this can’t explain why Bin Laden was allowed to escape Tora Bora in late 2001 or why, in 2007, as a half dozen B-2 Stealth bombers streaked back to Osama’s mountainous Afghan lair, commanders abruptly ordered them to return to their secret base in the Indian Ocean. And yet our media is focusing its anger on Pakistan for protecting Bin Laden and harboring him for five years in a villa next to the country’s elite military academy. And while the ire may be justified, this is yet another example of the proclivity to blame outsiders rather than ourselves –especially those of our own we look to for safekeeping, like, say, cops or priests.

Which is why, despite a litany of ecclesiastical atrocities, we are shocked that the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Jesuit order is doling out $166 million to settle more than 500 child sexual abuse claims against priests across five states. As plaintiffs’ attorney Blaine Tamaki noted, “These religious figures should have been responsible for protecting children, but instead raped and molested them.” But, then again, Blaine, what’s the point of becoming a priest if you can’t butt-fuck a cornucopia of little boys? What’s left besides starchy collars, free whiskey, and a sagging cot in a dank rectory? Even jet-setting Father Philip DeRea, known as the “Indy 500 priest” for performing the marriage of actress Ashley Judd to racer Dario Franchitti and for conducting mass for Indianapolis Racing League drivers, has been sued for buggering an 11-year-old boy and subsequently offering money for a vow of silence.

It is well known that reticence is how, in the main, cops protect one another from prosecution. Sometimes, fortunately, evidence is robust enough to cleave the “thin blue line”. Despite corroborating each other’s falsified incident reports, two Denver officers were fired when videotape undisputedly showed the duo beating several women to the ground outside a diner. In New Orleans, two cops were found guilty of beating a man to death, while three others were convicted of shooting a 31-year-old and subsequently burning his body. Six more await trial for gunning down hapless victims of Hurricane Katrina. NYPD patrolman Emmanuel Tavarez, for his part, took a far more cinematic approach; impersonating the Big Apple’s finest in stolen uniforms, his gang robbed drug dealers at gunpoint. And nearly twenty years after the fact, former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for obstruction of justice and for lying under oath about torturing criminal suspects. By the time a special prosecutor ruled that Burge and several of his detectives tortured more than 100 suspects into confessing to crimes between 1972 and 1991, the statute of limitations had unbelievably run out.

Sadly, there exists no such cutoff for the consequences of Mr. Bush’s ignominious stewardship of our nation. Yes, we are no longer subject to his conceited if maladroit swagger, but have we in its stead? Little more than empty rhetoric and aboulia as we remain mired in fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Witness our government acting like some incestuous archdiocese, fecklessly reassigning air traffic controllers who fall asleep or watch movies on the job. And while Mr. Obama might have delivered some measure of justice in Abbottabad, he has failed, through his equivocation, to furnish America’s much deserved catharsis.