SHOULD THE WHITE HOUSE RELEASE THE PHOTOS OF OSAMA’S DEMISE? Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) describes them as remarkably graphic, but that shouldn’t be all that surprising — war’s been hell for a very long time. But as the Anchoress writes (and click over for more links on this topic than just this excerpt):

Should the White House show the pictures of the dead bin Laden? I’m of two minds. Mussolini was shown in death, so why not bin Laden? I am not feeling especially worried about terrorists “hating us more” for showing the pictures. They’ve been hating us pretty steadily since the 1970’s, so it seems a vague and cowardly argument, to me.

By the same measure, though I did agree with President Obama that there was no need to “spike the football.” So I take a dim view of the fact that this utterance seems to have come with the usual expiration date, as he seems to be spiking it for fun and profit with some regularity, lately, and with his usual and long-standing lack of generosity.

Recall that when Sarah Palin stepped into the GOP ticket in ‘08, Obama and his crew could not even be generous enough to call her the Governor of Alaska, instead deriding her as a “small-town” mayor. He has not grown any more gracious in office, as this demonstrates, so color me unimpressed.

Moreover, I am getting the sense that President Obama has discovered that there is value — when all of your domestic policies are tanking or proving unpopular, ineffective or just not real — to being a wartime president, and he seems to see no irony at all in the fact that nabbing bin Laden would not have been possible if he had succeeded in blocking the Bush policies he so ardently fought while in the senate.

I keep wondering what the ego-gratifying “new cowboy/wartime president” suit may escalate down the road.

Veteran liberal columnist and MSNBC contributor Howard Fineman seems a bit worried about what will happen to the president further down the road as well.