If Karl Rove wants to make this campaign about precisely how much credit the President gets for getting Osama in Laden, all I can say is, “Bring it on.” He’s welcome to lie as much as he likes and to misquote Bill Clinton to his heart’s content. Rove and his sock-puppet had eight years to carry out the mission, and they funked it. Barack Obama focused on it and brought it in. Deal with it.
Footnote And if you were wondering whether the editorial page of the Murdochized Wall Street Journal would be even more insanely mendacious than the editorial page of the free-standing WSJ, the answer turns out to be “Yes.”
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
So now we know what Rove thinks Obama’s strong point is. Now if he can just figure out how to make GM being alive a bad thing.
Mark is a bit tribal this morning. As far as I know, there is nothing that the Obama administration did to catch bin Laden that the Bush administration did not also do. (Admittedly, Obama tremendously improved the propaganda tone, but that had nothing to do with the way we caught bin Laden.)
On the other hand, I do admit that “Obama saved GM and killed Osama” is great political propaganda, even though Bush (okay, Paulson) did a lot to save GM and tried hard to kill bin Laden.
One thing Obama did differently was not give up.
Karl Rove is not well!
For the sake of his health, he should retire from politics. I’m merely one year younger than poor Karl, and I’m so glad my physical vessel is not as in poor shape as his! I do believe he’s taking our his frustration in his eating habits on us with all his vitriol rhetoric and high-blood pressure rants. I hope he does see the unhealthy aspects to his chosen life style!
Ebenezer Scrooge has a most selective memory:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/05/02/162774/bush-bin-laden/
Thanks, Gus. You saved me the trouble.
The bigger question of course is, why was the Bush II administration not “worked up” about ObL? There are two reasons I can produce. One, Bush himself has a famously miniscule attention span, and when his Wanted: Dead or Alive poster didn’t work, he moved on to a new shiny object. The second is less benign: the Bushes are pretty well-known to be tied into the Saudi royals-and-friends. The bin Laden’s are definitely in the and-friends category, and Bushie decided that he didn’t want to piss off his friends. Or both could be true, I guess they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Oh, please. Do you guys normally believe every word that George Bush says?
No, I don’t. In fact, I only believe Bushie when his words are backed by (in)action. In this case, there was plenty of inaction backing his words. Not least among the inactions was trusting Afghani forces to block the exits from Tora Bora.
Also, don’t forget drawing down AF forces to go do whatever the hell that was in Iraq. (For the purposes of this comment, I make no other judgement on the AF conflict.)
As Mark said, go for it. Projecting your own weakness on to your rivals only works until you become absurd. And Rove is wearing the clown nose.
To be fair, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has always been mendacious, pre- and post-Murdoch. The change is that the actual news pages have become Murdochized as well.
But for Obama’s election, OBL would be alive and free in Pakistan. President McCain would have left him there.
Don’t forget that this comes from a minion of a former president who proclaimed during early 2002 that he was “truly not all that concerned about” bin Laden:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apLVd7_66ds&feature=related
I suspect that Karl Rove’s ambition is to manage Richard Nixon’s campaign for president of Hell. Who knows, what with the Republican Party’s organizational skills (and their having at least a significant plurality of the population there), it may be a campaign for re-election when Rove gets there.