But if rendering the foe that you just exterminated as a washed-up, post-virile, shut-in isn’t spiking the football, I don’t know what is. Had the president been honest on 60 Minutes, he would have said that the United States loves to spike the ball on its own terms—that is, when the spiking carries little risk of retaliation.

The administration’s recent propaganda efforts—or exercise in news management or whatever you want to call it—deserve greater scrutiny. The administration sent two different messages over the weekend about the Bin Laden capture, one for the foreign audience that doesn’t speak much English and one for the domestic audience.

The message for the foreign audience is a visual one: Bin Laden had so lost his mojo that he was just an old man freezing in a dump watching television.