CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Romney is certainly right when he says ‘I would have done it.’ There’s nobody of prominence in Washington that would not have done it, other than by his own admission the man who is a heart beat away from the presidency, Joe Biden. And of course anybody would. Romney is right, Jimmy Carter would have done it. Jimmy Carter, in fact, did something harder, which he had no success at. It was an extraction operation from a far distance, which is a lot easier to go in to kill than it is to extract your own people unharmed and he had a failure on his hands. Of course it would have been done. That was the tragic mission where the helicopters crashed into each other and where we were out to rescue the hostages and didn’t succeed. So I think that is sort of an open and shut case.
I think there is also a case to be made that Obama’s attacks are not only inaccurate, but unseemly. Inaccurate because Romney was talking about the larger context with a War on Terror and second, what he was saying in 2008 was that you don’t announce that you’re going into Pakistan because you don’t want to poison relations, but you do it. In fact, Obama himself, when he did the raid, did not announce he was going in public. In fact, he didn’t even tell the Pakistanis privately until it was over. So that’s a matter of diplomacy And it’s unseemly because the killing of bin Laden was a moment of solemnity, catharsis for the United States. Obama has every right to say I did it as a way to immunize himself against the traditional charges of being weak. But to taunt his opponents in saying, ‘I did it and you wouldn’t’ is unseemly and partisan. I think it was a big political mistake.
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Brit Hume’s Commentary on the President’s Touting of the Bin Laden Raid
Senior political analyst Brit Hume commented today on Special Report and said, “There is nothing wrong with President Obama and his campaign citing the bin Laden raid as one of the successes of his administration. Mr. Obama needs to be careful because there is almost certainly less political gold in those hills than he may imagine.”
Hume referenced a Gallup poll taken right after last year’s raid which asked people who they believe deserves credit for finding and killing bin Laden. Overwhelmingly 89 percent said the military while 35 percent said President Obama.
Regarding the president’s remarks today, Hume said engaging in partisan politics that way diminishes him in the eye of the public as being seen as presidential. He said, “In the rough and tumble of a campaign such distortions may be commonplace, but for the president himself to do it in the presence of a foreign leader in the White House brings one word to mind. Yuck.”
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Wild Thing’s comment……….
Thank you Charles and Brit….keep speaking out.
A lot of how we find out what takes place inside the White House comes from “insiders”. These insiders said that Obama was hesitant about taking Osama out and Panetta actually made the call.