As Pretty As A Song

“The official Church response was something along the lines of ‘The Book of Mormon the musical might entertain you for a night but The Book of Mormon,’ — the book as scripture — ‘will change your life through Jesus. Which we actually completely agree with. The Mormon Church’s response to this musical is almost like our q.e.d. at the end of it. That’s a cool, American response to a ribbing — a big musical that’s done in their name.”

“Before the Church responded, a lot of people would ask us, ‘Are you afraid of what the Church would say? And Trey and I were like, ‘They’re going to be cool.’ And they were like, ‘No they’re not. There are going to be protests.’ And we were like, ‘Nope, they’re going to be cool.’ We weren’t that surprised by the Church’s response. We had faith in them.”

I can’t remember a grimmer time for the Republican party in my lifetime. Now that Bin Laden is dead, the 2012 election seems like a formality. The setup is all wrong for the Republicans from almost every conceivable angle, with some of that being bad luck and some of it being poor strategy.

First of all, for the next eighteen months, Obama is going to respond to every single foreign-policy question by holding up Bin Laden’s head and swinging it in front of him like a lantern (metaphorically speaking, of course). It doesn’t matter what the question is: ask Obama about the Irish debt crisis, he’ll answer, “The Irish have been important allies in our fight against terrorism, which as you’ll recall resulted recently in the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden …” Things are so bad for the Republicans on this front that their only strategy left is to adopt an antiwar platform and complain about such things as the brutalizing of Afghan citizens by American troops and the illegality of the Bin Laden operation, things that would have been celebrated by the likes of Karl Rove had they occurred during a Bush presidency.

And from a domestic-policy standpoint the Republicans are similarly screwed, absent a new financial crisis, which of course is far from unlikely. A year or two ago anxiety about the economy and deficits was at an all-time high and the Republicans smartly rode public discontent by bashing Obama’s spending habits. But in following that path the party went a step or two too far, unleashing Paul Ryan on the budget; now, for the next eighteen months, Barack Obama can walk into Florida and Arizona and California and explain to every person over 50 that the Republicans want to eliminate the Medicare program as they know it. The Republicans meanwhile are already running sideways away from Ryan’s program, or at least are clearly concerned about having to enter 2012 owning Ryan’s Medicare-voucher program. Couple that with dropping unemployment levels and the stabilized capital markets (stabilized of course by massive ongoing government spending, but the casual voter knows little of this), and Obama can now waltz into 2012 claiming that while he was busy rescuing the wrecked economy left to him by George Bush, Republicans were using the financial chaos as an opportunity to launch long-planned attacks against Medicare and Social Security.

I am way too close to this whole episode to be rational about this in any way, shape or form. Last night was a good night for me. And not just for New York, or D.C., or America, but for human people. The face of the Arab world in America’s eyes, for too long, has been bin Laden. And now, it is not. Now, the face is only the young people in Egypt, and Tunisia, and all the Middle Eastern countries… (where) freedom rises up, al Qaeda’s opportunity is gone. Al Qaeda’s opportunity is gone.

For the last ten years, al Qaeda had the world’s attention. They apparently wanted an ideology competition. And for all our rights and wrongs, and the world’s rights and wrongs, all al Qaeda seems to have come up with is, ‘Uhhhh, all right, we killed some Americans. How ‘bout killing some British people? Maybe bombing Yemen? Shoe bomb doesn’t work? How ‘bout an underwear bomb?’ They have nothing.