Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
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  • Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

When I first saw this shot of the White House Situation Room, on the front pages of both the Sun-Times and the Tribune yesterday, I had a visceral reaction unlike any I’d had since the photos of the Twin Towers burning almost 10 years ago.

I thought about it, and actually had my students help me analyze the picture in class yesterday. And I think I know why it’s so powerful.

Look at the expressions on the faces of the people in that room, intently gazing at a screen showing the firefight where Osama bin Laden met his end. They’re all totally engaged, rapt with the vision of this violence half a world away.

Now shift gears: Picture yourself walking into this scene, not in the White House, but in some small-town or big-city bar, a place you’ve never been before, where as you walk in, you have to instantly ask yourself: can I have a quiet drink here, or will there be trouble? And who in this room is potentially trouble?

Most of the men, especially Biden, the men standing in the background, and the guy sitting next to Clinton, seem timid. Their body language is inward, cautious. Nothing to worry about there. Three men in the room, though, have the body language and the gaze that say one thing: I am one bad motherfucker, and you better think twice about starting anything with me.

Defense Secretary Gates, in the lower right corner. Chief of Staff Bill Daley, standing in the blue suit in the middle of the shot.

President Obama. Seated, at ease, but leaning forward with a palpable intensity, hands clasped, ready for action. Affectless expression, cold, steely. The baddest motherfucker in the room, and you know it, and he knows it, and everyone else in the room knows it, and with this photo, maybe the world knows it.

73 replies on “Bad Motherfuckers”

  4. The president bought into the naivete du jour and thought finding bin Laden would be a rallying point for the country after ten years of… BLLLLEEEEEECCCH.

    But, obviously he’s an idiot because no one cares. A nine point bump in the polls? BFD.

    Will the president finally learn to stop acting like Bush? Being Bush II (or III?) is alienating what’s left of a disenchanted progressive base and has no affect on conservatives, who want nothing else but a one-term Obama administration.

  6. God forbid one of them was yawning or something when the picture was taken.

    My wife reads the gossip rags, and when she shows me a pic I’m always complaining about how they take some snapshot and spin a whole story out of what could be a captured blink instead of someone being drunk, and so on.

    This is silly, IOW.

  8. People are upset about someone else’s interpretation of facial expressions in a picture.
    They then counter with their own interpretations.

    The internet is for trolls.

  11. @28, Bill Daley is not the man in uniform. He’s in civilian clothes (navy blue suit, blue tie), standing next to John Lithgow’s stunt double. I find his expression the most interesting. He looks steely, but also like he’s wincing at what might be a gory end to a completely unsympathetic character. Or maybe he’s concerned for the Seals. Maybe he has gas. We have no idea at what exact point this picture was snapped. But I wouldn’t call it a bad-ass motherfucker expression at all.

  12. A picture captures one minuet instant in time. In this picture we only have the vaguest idea of the context of that instant because we are not privy to scene that has elicited their reactions. Was this the exact instant Bin Laden was Shot? Probably not. If it were we would expect to see relief.

    Because of the limited context of this picture, it’s really quite difficult to draw any useful conclusions. A video would be far more illuminating.

  13. One measure of a truly bad mf is the distance that s/he can project her/his power. Street thugs think they are bad, because they can project power across the room, or, at best, across town. In other words, as far as their limited imaginations can take them.

    What makes this a room full of bad mf’s is that they can pull off something like this, watch it happen real time, and resume munching on turkey pita wraps.

    We all bring whatever we bring to interpreting a picture. But I get what CF is trying to say. The intensity on the faces of BHO & RMG is certainly ice cold and suggests, “I got something for your ass”. WMD looks a little less intimidating than the blue-shirt-sleeved guy to his right,

    My next fave expression is Jt. Chiefs Chair Michael Mullins’, in the tan shirt and tie. Dude looks so unassuming. Went to the Naval Academy and Harvard Business School. He can deconstruct your pathetic life in 100 elegant words or less, just before he ends it with his bare hands. Truly a bad motherfucker.

  14. @63, it’s precisely the distance over which they can project their power that makes them NOT bad motherfuckers. The bad motherfuckers are the seals who were there, executing the mission they’d trained for. Looking “ice cold” is easy when you are protected from any physical danger whatsoever, watching the action on a monitor. As little as I respect Obama, I suspect he has the sense to know he’s not a badass anything.

    How does watching soldiers do their job thousands of miles away make one a bad motherfucker? Because they approved the mission? Because they got to watch it live?

    This is no different from Republicans who think G.W. was “tough” because he ordered a bunch of soldiers to do things he couldn’t do himself.

  16. @Y’all

    Now that I’ve had time to digest some of this (sorry I didn’t join in sooner, but I do have a day job) , let me just say: this was just my attempt to understand my reaction to this photo. I didn’t guide my students to this interpretation (@Irena), it was something we came to together. I’m not a fan of war, but if you’re going to be in a war, I’d like a Bad Motherfucker (like Truman or FDR or Churchill) running things so we get it the fuck over and get out. I really tried to read the body language, and we can disagree about how that body language reads. But this isn’t about How Evil War Is. Given. Or how Leader Worship is bad. Ja,mein herren.

    But nonetheless, fuck OBL. I’m not sorry he’s dead, I’m not sorry that this death was planned for a long time and watched by these men and women in this White House room. I don’t think that we can judge their moral status by saying they’re lesser for not being on that Apache and doing the killing themselves. Get real.

    And of course the truly bad motherfuckers are the Navy Seals. No fucking shit. I wasn’t doing a comprehensive rating of Bad Mothefuckerhood. I have a nephew in the Marines on a fucking ship off Afghanistan right now, and he’s a badder motherfucker than anyone in that room on that level. Or anyone on this comment thread, for that matter (unless some of you are Marines or Navy Seals, in which case, please forgive my presumptuousness).

    But in that picture, who is the baddest motherfucker? BHO.

    And all the way back to the first few comments regarding my inability to identify bad motherfuckers: I’ve been tending bar in various Chicago saloons for almost 30 years (and I still do one night a week). I’ve broken up or prevented hundreds of barfights over these decades. Part of that profession requires looking for trouble before it happens, which means reading body language. Furthermore, I’m the son, brother, nephew, cousin and friend of scores of cops and military men and women. So you can take your assumptions about my Ivory Tower cluelessness and my lack of contact with truly Bad Motherfuckers and shove it right up your orifice of choice.

    I know what I know, and I know what I see in that photo.

  18. @Chicago Fan, just so you don’t think I’m being cranky, please imagine me smiling (especially during the harsher criticisms) while speaking quietly and slowly. That’s how I typed this, anyway.

    I don’t think that we can judge their moral status by saying they’re lesser for not being on that Apache and doing the killing themselves. Get real.

    Of course we can’t. But we can judge them by the bodies of the innocent men, women, and children that have been burned to a crisp and blown to bloody pieces by their useless policies. We can judge them by their willingness to imprison suspects without due process, to prosecute government whistle-blowers while ignoring the crimes of the previous administration, to maintain secret prisons where people are held without trials.

    To embrace, in the service of politics, the perpetrators of such oppressive, destructive polices, is an inherently conservative act.

    I have no idea about what you do or don’t know about being a “badass,” because I don’t know you, but saying that Obama is the “baddest MF in the room” is like saying that G.W. Bush was most experienced male in the room when he read “My Pet Goat” to a group of elementary school children. It’s just nonsense, and it’s really not unreasonable to question your judgment on the subject when you call staring at images on a monitor of soldiers thousands of miles away gunning down a sick, frail, unarmed man (despite his obvious and wretched crimes), “badass.”

    Who here is “sorry that OBL is dead?” Nobody. That doesn’t mean that planning his execution was the right thing (or even the legal thing) to do. Due process is more complicated than than vengeance. But this adminstration has proven to be even less interested in due process than the previous one.

    Glenn Greenwald – a liberal who values liberalism over partisanship – recently wrote, “…when even the most heinous Nazi war criminals were hunted down by the Israelis, they weren’t shot in the head and then dumped into the ocean, but rather were apprehended, tried in a court of law, confronted with the evidence against them for all the world to see, and then punished in accordance with due process. The same was done to leading Nazis found by Allied powers and tried at Nuremberg.”

    Greenwald also points out that when announcing bin Laden’s death, Obama said, “But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history… And Greenwald responds to this childish nationalism appropriately, writing, “Does hunting down Osama bin Laden and putting bullets in his skull really ‘remind us that we can do whatever we set our mind to’? Is that really ‘the story of our history’? That seems to set the bar rather low in terms of national achievement and character.”

    The last administration and its loyalists lowered the bar a great deal. This administration and its loyalists seem determined to keep it there.

  19. fyi, there was no live video feed, no helmetcam, they’re listening to radio report updates from the field.

    and that ‘little lady’ in the back? Director for Counterterrorism in the Executive Office when she’s not busy running the CIA’s Global Jihad unit.

    Fox Force Five!

  20. Chicago Fan, with all due respect, I stand by what I said about the importance of encouraging critical reflection with a photo like this. Classrooms are for examining national myth-making, not embracing it, and I think you should have challenged your students on the conclusions they arrived at. If you did, and you simply didn’t have time to make that clear, then great. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t encourage consensus on this issue; I would encourage debate, and an opportunity for students to examine their own biases and assumptions.

  21. @Irina
    I encourage debate all the time; in fact, my students complain that they don’t know what I think because I can argue any side of the situation in class. And I didn’t know there was a national consensus about this picture when we discussed it Tuesday morning. Seems like it’s becoming bigger news every day, though.

  23. Until I read this post, I didn’t realize that the president was in the photo. Granted, I hadn’t studied it at great length, but I looked right past him every time I saw this. He has the look of a kid at the grown ups table, like his feet don’t touch the ground when he sits in the chair. And that’s the baddest motherfucker in the room?

    Today Hillary is proclaiming from the rooftops that she had her hand over her mouth to stifle an allergy cough. Those of you who felt that this photo showed some shred of humanity in her, bit your collective tongues. She would like you to know that this is absolutely not the case.

    The fact that the Seals raided the compound and shot Bin Laden in the head after the fact (not in a firefight, this was an execution) does not change anything in the grand scheme of things. We are still ass deep in 2 wars, and getting sucked into a 3rd. Move along, people. Nothing to see.

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