The maverick has a fainting spell
by digby
Now this is the very definition of chutzpah:
"Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad. This is the same President who once criticized Hillary Clinton for invoking bin Laden 'to score political points.'
"This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn't 'spike the ball' after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected.
"No one disputes that the President deserves credit for ordering the raid, but to politicize it in this way is the height of hypocrisy.
I hate "commander in chief" hagiography and I find the ad in question to be maudlin and distasteful, but this charge of "politicizing" war coming from a Republican, particularly Mavericky McCain, the man who never met a war he wasn't for, is a bit much. You want shameless politicizing? I've got shameless politicizing:
Like I said, the ongoing campaign argument over which person ordering death from afar is the more "courageous" is wrong no matter who's selling it. But for John McCain (who put footage of himelf as a POW in pretty much every campaign commercial he ever made) to decry politicizing war and national security is really rich. Between McCain and George W Bush, the aught years were an orgy of self-congratulations, paeans to their own greatness and celebrations of war and killing. They set the standard.
And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but even if Barack Obama kills terrorists with his bare hands on national television they will not grant him entry into the macho boys club. Indeed, as you can see by today's breathless response by the Maverick flyboy, they'll just turn around and have a teary pearl clutching party, and complain that he's an uncouth ruffian for exposing America's delicate sensibilities to such ill-mannered boasting. Did I mention shameless?
I know that many Democrats love this "America -fuck yeah!" stuff as much as the Republicans do so maybe this time they'll finally win that contest for who has the most blood-lust and the biggest cojones. But if Democrats are expecting that the ordering of assassinations and drone strikes will take "Democrats are soft on national security" off the table, I'd just remind them that it wasn't long ago that everyone thought President Clinton took "Democrats are fiscally irresponsible" off the table. How'd that work out?