(UPDATES after the jump.)

As we all know subconsciously, when a bad person does a bad thing, or when a bad thing happens to a bad person, the more extreme your public expressions of fury (in the case of the former) or joy (in the case of the latter), the better a person you are. You have positioned yourself far from the bad person, as far as you possibly could, and therefore must be – by virtue of your hatred of the bad person alone – admirably good.

So when a really evil person is killed, if you want to gain some quick credibility points, if you want to stand out from the crowd, you’re going to have to do more than just cheer: you’re going to have to gloat with style:

Osama Bin Laden is dead newspaper front pages

Seen better? Those are the most over-the-top front pages I’ve found, but I suspect there’ll be even more provocative headlines to be found within newspapers, on the polemicists’ pages – even here in Australia.

ELSEWHERE: Apparently not cutting quickly enough to a news conference long before it’s actually started is also reason to doubt a news organisation’s credibility. If the ABC was full of good people and therefore really hated Osama Bin Laden, they’d have interrupted all their programming on their non-news channels to speculate feverishly on what was going to be announced, rather than waiting till it was announced. (I did have ABC News 24 on, and I was fairly sure they were talking about the Obama conference long before it actually happened – but, still, I always take at face value everything News Ltd says about the ABC, and if they say they didn’t, then I must be remembering things wrong.)

ELSEWHERE #2: Any journalists called the Prime Minister (who supposedly opposes the death penalty) on suddenly “celebrating” the killing of a self-admitted terrorist? Or would that be a bit too brave at this point?

UPDATE: Seen any quotes attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr today? Like this one?

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”

Well said, whoever came up with that quote before someone decided to pretend it was by Martin Luther King, Jr, which it wasn’t.

UPDATE #2: Nobody could accuse the Herald Sun of being modest:

(Via Flashboard Wars.)

UPDATE #3: The Daily Telegraph thinks there will be no more “evil”:

While the Gold Coast Bulletin thinks it’s much better that it took a decade, than if they’d been able to apprehend him earlier:

And how rude of them to describe it as “revenge”. Didn’t they get the memo that the word we’re supposed to use is “justice”?

UPDATE #4: For a supposed journalist, Andrew Bolt seems disturbingly unconcerned with whether a claim is “true or not”:

Seriously? It doesn’t make a difference to you either way?