Obama: Remember When I Vowed to Not Rest Until I'd Gotten Osama bin Ladin? Yeah... Well, It's Not Really That Important, Is It?

For years Bush has contended that so long as bin Ladin was severed from operational control of Al Qaeda, that was kinda-sorta good enough.

Now, Bush never really believed it was good enough. None of us do. But he was spinning reality -- it's really, really hard to find one guy in the mountains of Northwestern Pakistan. And so even if we haven't gotten the big prize, hey, we still have accomplished something. We haven't sacked the quarterback, but we're getting lots of hurries and hits on him.

On top of that, he is probably dead, or will eventually die, and when that happens, they will conceal that fact. And so even if he dies, we'll likely never know.

Unless we happen to get very lucky with some very good intel and very good troops and nail him.

But the left has maligned Bush for seven years, insisting it really was no difficult trick to find a six-foot-five guys with a dialysis machine on his hip, as the endlessly-repeated hack liberal clapper-joke goes.

And Obama specifically vowed to succeed where Bush had failed.

But oh, now that he's charged with actually following through... he adopts Bush's spin to lower expectations and to absolve himself of all blame for failing to get bin Ladin, should he be unable to achieve the impossible extremely difficult.

As Geraghty says: All Obama campaign promises come with an expiration date. All of them.

January 20th is looking like the expiration date for most of them: (Link fixed.)

"If we have so tightened the noose that he's in a cave somewhere and can't even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America."

I don't seem to remember Chris Matthews or Bill Maher or the rest of the cockholster clan being satisfied with that answer when Bush offered it.

Somehow I suspect it will go down a lot easier coming from The One.

Thanks to DrewM.

posted by Ace at 05:46 PM

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