Vision, Mission, and Strategy
Hillbilly Politics
Clintonian courage and the downside of being found out later to have failed to act on OBL-whereabouts intel
The pre-May Day, ‘Barack killed bin Laden’, Obama campaign ad appearance by former President Bill Clinton almost convinces me that Hillary will replace Biden on the 2012 Democratic Party ticket. Why else would the man who slayed Ross Perot twice and an al-Qaeda night watchman in Afghanistan state the following for the man that called him a racist during the 2008 South Carolina Democratic Primary?:
“He had to decide. And that’s what you hire a president to do. You hire the president to make the calls when no one else can do it,” Clinton said in the video, which sought to contrast Obama with his Republican foe Mitt Romney. “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there, and it hadn’t been bin Laden,” Clinton said in the one-and-a-half minute video. “Suppose they’d been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him. But he reasoned, I cannot in good conscience do nothing. He took the harder and more honorable path.”
Would that President Clinton had made similar and harder, ‘honorable path’ decisions on the fate of the man who declared war on America in 1998, but the ad featuring the husband of President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State wasn’t content to merely praise Obama, as it also contained a four-year old quote from Mitt Romney as doubting the merits of searching for bin Laden:
“It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney was quoted as saying in a news report included on a CNN program when he was a Republican candidate four years ago.
It wasn’t Mitt Romney that voted twice to cut off funding for combat troops in the Afghan theatre when they were about the business of gathering the intel that eventually led to Obama’s only great moment of his presidency. No, it was then-Senator Obama (D-Il) and then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) that opposed swabbing the noses of high-level al-Qaedaofficials, including the mastermind of 911, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (pictured). We now know that critical information on OBL’s location was learned from the persons whose noses were swabbed, and which persons, incredibly, continue to live despite having been water-boarded.
What really takes courage is to stay the course with both feet planted firmly on the ground for a strong national defense over many years, so that events like the one Obama now credits as defining his manhood are even possible.
But this is, after all, the same Bill Clinton who served as the last-ditch ObamaCare lobbyist-in-Chief that convinced Jim Webb and the other 59 Democrat senators to ram a version of Hillary’s socialized medicine dream down Americans throat even after Scott Brown took Ted Kennedy’s seat, but I digress.
Most all Americans admire President Barack Obama’s decision to authorize the military action that killed Osama bin Laden after having the intel of the whereabouts of the man responsible the murder of 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001, for nine months. But let’s not pretend that the decision wasn’t a no-brainer.
Not to have take out OBL carried more political risk and would have taken more courage, of a sort, (The appeasing kind that most Democrats have practiced most of the past 40 years.), than the one to send in the Seals, but here we have Clinton wanting Obama to be praised as courageous for doing what most Republicans support everyday, i.e. an aggressive defense of the United States that never considers Miranda warnings and OJ trials in NYC for OBLs.
Anyone paying the least bit of attention to the respective parties since 1972 knows that any Republican capable of being the GOP nominee will be more aggressive on defense matters than any Democrat since JFK. (Here, we don’t honor the kind of ‘hawkishness’ displayed by LBJ in the tapes that reveal his belief that the war he escalated in Vietnam could not be won.)
Moreover, Mitt Romney has made clear his good judgment on such matters with his consistently hawkish stance toward an Iran that President Obama appeased while the Mullahs mowed down innocents yearning to breathe free in Iranian streets.
The suggestion that a President Mitt Romney would not have taken the action President Obama took, given the same intelis about as believable as the one about not having had sex with “that woman, Monica Lewinsky”. What must take real courage is to pass oneself off in public as the arbiter of all things courageous, having never exhibited any, less than 10,000 feet over Kosovo.
We will say this for former President Clinton though. Unlike Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama’s husband, he and Mitt Romney have both endorsed the kind of aggressive interrogation techniques applied to KSM that led to the intel that led to bin Laden. Had Hillary and Barack had their way after 911, OBL would probably still be alive today, as would thousands of al-Qaeda operatives killed by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq and that kept America free from any terrorist attacks on U.S. soil until the Fort Hood workplace incident that occurred on President Obama’s watch.
Mike DeVine
Atlanta Law & Politics columnist – Examiner.com
Editor - Hillbilly Politics
Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
More DeVine Gamecock rooster crowings at Unified Patriots, and all Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-eds archived at Townhall.com.
Mike.
You are usually a little bit clearer in the point you are making with your posts but this one seems a little muddled. What is your point. Are you defending Mitt, are you promoting Hilary as VP, are you belittling Bill, and are you…..well you are always bashing Obama.
I think what you are trying to say is Obama could have never accomplished this were it not for his predecessor GWB and some of the work he had done. You are very correct. But that is part of what makes this country great and why we have elections every four years. So that the incoming president can build on what was beneficial and change what was not. What president can say he did not benefit in some way from some of the deeds of his predecessor.
Indeed it appears water-boarding did indeed produce some valuable intel. But you are a lawyer come on “does the end justify the means”. When in court would you say its ok to rob a bank if you have to feed your kids. Oh but wait they changed the rules and said waterboarding was ok.
Like I said your point is a little muddled but maybe not because it is always your point to bash Obama or any democrat for that matter. Maybe this is some deep seeded identity dilemma you have with your democratic roots. You know some kind of self-hatred type thing. Just sayin.
Black in America Baby……The revolution has been televised……Obama in ‘12
Yes! The Hillary reference was just a tease for the 2012-obsessed at Redstate.com! Obviously any President would have acted on this intel and it couldn’t take “courage” unless we really water down the word. It did take courage for President Bush to stay the course during the Dems’ “Bush Lied” Era. And yes, I am ashamed that I didn’t have the courage to leave the loathsome Dem Party until 2000.