I surely batten on to Terry Gross a lot, because she’s so good and smart, and revered, and because her foreign-policy views are actually not very progressive. The other day she was interviewing Al Qaeda maven Peter Bergen on Fresh Air and said:
GROSS: There’s quite a level of distrust now between Pakistan and the U.S. Pakistan, it’s my understanding that the government and the military really resent that the U.S. went and raided bin Laden’s home and took him out without letting the Pakistani authorities know that this was going to happen.
Am I wrong to bridle at “took him out”? It seems swaggery and inappropriate. But probably they say this all the time on MSNBC? And this followed on the heels of Bergen saying that Pakistanis don’t believe we got bin Laden and when Gross said, what do they think happened in Abbotabad, he said, They think it was a Hollywood operation. “Take him out” is Hollywood. I asked a friend if I was being oversensitive. He said, I too find it objectionable: akin to “rub out,” “pop,” and other gangster slang for killings. I would never use it and have corrected people who do. It has caught on, I’m afraid, and is halfway to general adoption. I started hearing it in 2002 used by apologists for Bush–“We should take out Saddam.” Let’s try to stop it getting much further.
