Views

This photo is about to become the most viewed photo on Flickr, surpassing a photo of some waterfall in China that half the Chinese population has seen. It's a very dramatic view of the prez and cabinet watching the assassination of Bin Laden in real time.

As an aside, that word "assassination" always reminds me of a great Dave Chapelle routine where he says "This guy told me Tupac was assassinated. I said No, Martin Luther King was assassinated. That motherfucker was shot!" I guess that means everything's relative - one man's hero is always another man's gangster. Such is the way of things. I suppose that means Bin Laden was just shot.

By the way, I want this photographer Pete Souza's job. All he does is follow the president around and take pictures of everything he does, and he posts them to the White House Flickr account in a continuous stream. I notice he used the same camera (Canon 5D II) and lenses I do.

It wasn't until I downloaded the full-size version of this photo that I noticed that they "pixilated" the contents of the photograph on Hillary's laptop computer. Perhaps we'll be able to download that one too after the dust settles. Or maybe it's just a Google Earth shot of the compound in which case I've already seen it.

Some of the comments on this photo when it was cross-posted on the NPR Facebook feed were hilarious. Many of them reveal a great disapointment in the actual situation room...

"Why are John Lithgow and Craig T Nelson there?"

"Is Barack sitting on a bean bag?"

"How come our helicopters fail so often?"

"Why do they use those shitty microsoft computers?"

"Because they aren't interested in Itunes right now."

"We had bin laden in our sights, but then our live messenger crashed and we had to hit ctrl alt del and by the time we reboot his henchmen text him on his iphone and he google mapped a way out. damn it"

"Great picture. And, yet, it's weird to think that the set of the sit room on The West Wing was nicer than the one in real life...also, bigger."

"Wolf Blitzer thinks that situation room sucks."

"Equality, one woman with all those men"

" I bet Kaddafi won't sleep too well tonight..."

"This photo owns"

"theyre like yup, that motherfuckers dead"

"Wow, the situation room looks much less cool than I've been led to believe."

"I have to agree. I was expecting a much cooler room."

"I was expecting much cooler laptops! HP? Lenovos? seriously?"

"THAT'S the situation room?!? Where are the LCD screens? The huge glass/LED table? The dramatic lighting? It looks like they're crammed into a meeting room at the Days Inn.

"I'm disappointmented in the situation room. It's tiny and the PRESIDENT is crammed in the corner. Altho that does show what a regular guy he is. That's cool."

"I was expecting the situation room to be a little bigger."

"Cool, this looks like every CIA, FBI, West Wing, 24ish type show I've ever seen and I can imagine it was that intense. Although, I pictured the situation room to be bigger. This looks like the room the keg is in at a Frat party. Hey, Biden....beer pong?"

"Biden's just thinking .."man, I thought there was gonna be popcorn"

" I imagined it to be more like on West Wing. Looks like a normal conference room. Thanks NPR for shattering my illusions... :("