Son of Erick attempts to make point, trips over floppy clown shoes!
Say what you will about President Obama, but it is hard to imagine two years ago he would have taken unilateral military action in Pakistan without telling the Pakistani government. He has grown in office....
My, my how governing is so different from campaigning.
Remember the 2008 campaign? (Link goes to Steve Benen.)
Which candidate for which party said he would take "unilateral military action in Pakistan without telling the Pakistani government" if it meant nailing Bin laden? And which candidate for which party said that doing so would be naive and irresponsible and proved Obama's foreign policy candyassedness?
Well, they keep records of this sort of thing...
In July 2008, CNN's Larry King interviewed then-presidential candidate John McCain. The host asked the Republican senator, "If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him?"
McCain said he would not.
"Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why: because Pakistan is a sovereign nation."
This point of contention from the 2008 campaign has generally been forgotten, but for a couple of months, this was a major area of debate. Barack Obama declared he would pursue high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, launching limited attacks based on actionable intelligence. Republicans insisted this was not only the wrong policy, but that the position was evidence of Obama's inexperience in matters of national security.
Even Mitt Romney tried a similar tack during a nationally televised GOP debate:
"[Obama] went from going to sit down to tea with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies. I mean, he's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."
It's always fascinating, the stuff floating around in the wingnut memory cesspit...
For the record, August 2007:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama issued a pointed warning yesterday to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.
MAS. See Media Matters for a roundup of the wingnut reaction to Obama's 2007 speech.
MAS. From the Red State archives:
Last summer, [Obama] also indicated that were he elected to the presidency, and were the US to obtain actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets within Pakistan, he would act unilaterally if President Musharraf did not. It was an amateurish enough error to earn Obama schooling from Sen. Biden (“The way to deal with it is not to announce it”), and was dismissed as downright irresponsible by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister. Yet Obama reiterated his commitment to unilateral action, under these circumstances, in Saturday’s debate. So not only did he exhibit a serious deficiency in judgment the first time round. It seems he still has not learned his lesson.