When President Obama, summing up the killing of Osama bin Laden, said, “Justice has been done,” the problem wasn’t simply that he misspoke — justice, after all, can only emerge at the end of an impartial judicial proceeding — but that, in so misspeaking, he hit the emotional bull’s-eye.

“Justice has been done.”

We got him, America! Oh yeah, sweet! Who can’t feel the pop of satisfaction in those words? “He should have said, ‘Retaliation has been accomplished,’” Marjorie Cohn pointed out recently at Common Dreams, and that’s true, of course, but the president wasn’t summoning the dry, sober rule of law. He was evoking, just as George W. Bush did before him, the Wild West, America’s deepest font of mythology, where justice, you know, comes from the muzzle of a revolver. As with Geronimo, so with Osama: Wanted Dead or Alive.

“. . . it was the Indians who, by the ambush, the atrocity, and the capture of the white women . . . became the aggressors and so sealed their own fate,” writes Tom Engelhardt in The End of Victory Culture, describing the first mythological enemy we created as we carved a nation out of a continent.

U.S. newspapers sometimes print what they call the total death count from one or more of our wars, and all the dead who are listed are Americans. They aren't all the Americans. They don't include contractors or suicides or various other categories of dead Americans. They certainly don't include those who died for lack of basic needs while we dumped half of our public treasury into wars.

But they also don't include anyone from that 95% of humanity that's not from the United States. In our current wars, well over 95% of the dead, even in the short-term, are from the countries where the wars are fought. Some get labeled combatants and some civilians, but they're all left out of most body counts, and when they are counted they are counted low. Our government pretends not to count them at all, and only thanks to Wikileaks do we know otherwise, that the military has counted some of them.

Editor Benjamin Marrison
Columbus Dispatch
34 S. 3rd St.
Columbus, OH 43215

Dear Mr. Marrison:

In your subtle way, your lead editorial on Sunday April 15 was the most disingenuous yet: “Kasich and the House put Ohio on a sustainable path after predecessors failed” is a cruel joke.
· Bill Harris led the Senate in blocking Strickland and Budish from most of their good solution to budget problems.
· It would have been a waste of time and effort to pass more Bills in the House which would have been blocked in the Senate. Several were blocked.
· The “Jobs Budget” and SB 5 will cause losses by the state and sub state governments at all levels. · Please read the enclosed letter for evidence that Republicans caused the “mess we are in”:
1. The Republican Income Tax cut of 2005, which favored those with high income accounts for $ 1 billion per year.