I'd very much like to make a sensible comment or two about this event.

That's not really as easy a thing to do as it might at first appear. To acknowledge the event at all seems hard for some people: If that sort of messy business must occasionally be done for the greater good, so be it. Let those low-brows who MUST deal with it pay the penalty, while the rest of us go on obliviously about our more exalted affairs.

On the other hand, there's the matter of TONE. Isn't there something a little off-putting about the puffed-up, bowtied little academics on the cable channels who so transparently and somewhat pathetically GLORY in the matter: Three  ignorant young fools are dead here. People who obviously couldn't bait a fishhook or defend their school lunch money, nowhere to be found when their PERSONAL turn to make a difference came (and went), all of a sudden tranformed in front of the cameras into vicarious participants in the victory "we" achieved? Aren't we sick to death of this sort of easy, juvenile play-acting at a simple-minded distortion of  'patriotism'?

There IS a victory here, but I think it's important to understand what it really was, and what it emphatically WASN'T: Right beat wrong, for sure. It's certainly a personal victory for  the heroic Mr. Phillips and his family and friends. It's a personal victory for the military  and the national security teams who did everything exactly right in a scenario where so much might have gone wrong. It's a victory for President Obama, not least because he has avoided (so far) the premature triumphalist chest-thumping so beloved of  the previous Administration. His cool, restrained demeanor in crisis is perhaps a welcome revelation to some segments of the population. It's a victory for the Democratic Party, as loath as some of us are to admit it: You can't get people's votes in dangerous times, if they aren't convinced you'll play BOTH smart (always) AND for keeps (when necessary).