Why Obama's bin Laden Ad Drives Republicans Crazy

Lucrum · May 3, 2012

Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonaldÃ¢â¬â¢s and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. ItÃ¢â¬â¢s the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.

Thank you Team 6

377OHMS · May 3, 2012

Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

Normal people find Obama's incessant bragging about OBL offputting because they know he had precious little to do with it, the intel that made it possible came from Bush era enhanced interrogation programs that Obama savagely criticized, and the claim that Romney would have been too timid to make the call is patently ridiculous.
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Well said.

All the mechanisms and special teams that were developed during the Bush administration enabled that raid. Obama still took over 16 hours to decide to let them go in even after being shown pictures of OBL pacing back and forth on his walled upstairs balcony.

To me the whole thing looks like desperation. The incumbent should be well ahead at this point and instead the polls have Obama and Romney both within the statistical uncertainty of the polling methods employed. I think Obama is in trouble and knows it.

He isn't Winston Churchill who personally killed lots of people in the Boer War and also in various conflicts in Africa, he is Neville Chamberlain waiving a note from Herr Hitler.

Max E. · May 3, 2012

Quote from Lucrum:

Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonaldÃ¢â¬â¢s and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. ItÃ¢â¬â¢s the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.

Thank you Team 6
More...

PHOENIX TRADING · May 3, 2012

Quote from AK Forty Seven:

http://news.yahoo.com/why-obamas-bin-laden-ad-drives-republicans-crazy-070000855.html

Why Obama's bin Laden Ad Drives Republicans Crazy

Nothing aggravates Republicans like seeing nasty, effective tactics upon which they have so long relied being turned against one of their candidates. So when Barack Obama's re-election campaign aired an ad celebrating the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death â and suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn't have achieved that objective â the right exploded with outraged protests.

Evidently, the feelings of longtime hatchet men like Bush-era party chair Ed Gillespie, ex-Bush flack Ari Fleischer and the editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal, to name a few, were really, really hurt â because the Obama campaign exploited a moment of national unity for partisan advantage.

"This is one of the reasons President Obama has become one of the most divisive presidents in American history," said Gillespie, now a Romney adviser.

To anyone with a functioning memory, however, this whining is implausible. So are the dire predictions that the president will somehow offend voters by claiming credit for whacking bin Laden (or by smacking Romney). During the Bush presidency, Republicans used precisely the same approach and worse, over and over, without fretting whether their words and ads were "divisive."

It began weeks after the 9/11 attacks, amid sincere pledges of patriotic cooperation from congressional Democrats, when Karl Rove told the Republican National Committee that their party would "go to the country on this issue" to win the midterm elections in 2002. They won a historic victory by sliming wounded Vietnam hero Max Cleland and former Air Force intelligence officer Tom Daschle as stooges of al-Qaida.

Bush's 2004 re-election campaign amplified the same themes, with advertising and pageantry at the Republican convention in New York City grossly exploiting 9/11, a series of conveniently timed terror "alerts" leading up to Election Day and repeated warnings by Vice President Dick Cheney that a Democratic victory would signal weakness to America's enemies. And it persisted into the 2006 midterm, with Rove falsely portraying Democrats as limp-wristed "liberals" trying to "understand" Osama bin Laden.

Until that election, the rough Rovian style succeeded brilliantly â despite the fact that Bush and Cheney had actually allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to escape at Tora Bora. Obama's cool order to kill bin Laden, in a moment of considerable risk to his presidency, finally debunked the decade of smears against Democrats as unpatriotic, wimpish and unreliable.

By contrast, the Obama ad's brief rebuke of Romney is at least factual and accurate: Not only did he say what the ad quotes, but he also said that he wouldn't go into Pakistan to get bin Laden, which is what the mission required. Had the president followed Romney's policy recommendation, bin Laden would almost certainly still be at large.

"Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order," scoffed Romney in response. But he shouldn't be so quick to denigrate the former Democratic president, who entered the Navy during World War II and then served as a submarine officer until his honorable discharge in 1953. Somebody may compare Carter's service with Romney's own military record, which doesn't exist â and remind voters that he avoided the Vietnam draft with a pampered stint as a Mormon missionary, in France.
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Funny how the young jimmy carter at least had a pair unlike the last 40 yrs.

btw: He entered the naval academy (1943) it's not like he went to the battle of Midway or something.

Ricter · May 3, 2012

The only thing easier is being an armchair non-participant.

Spike Trader · May 4, 2012

Quote from Lucrum:

Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonaldÃ¢â¬â¢s and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. ItÃ¢â¬â¢s the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.

Thank you Team 6
More...

lol . . . . luke , then why did you blame Obama when those secret service guys spent your tax dollars on booze and whores ?

Ricter · May 4, 2012

Quote from Spiker:

lol . . . . luke , then why did you blame Obama when those secret service guys spent your tax dollars on booze and whores ?
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Nice.