Tomasky: How the GOP Became a Party of Whiners Over Osama

[bigtree]

Republicans love to act like tough guys. Yet it’s the Democrat in the White House who got bin Laden—and the GOP that’s throwing a temper tantrum about a modest Obama ad.

by Michael Tomasky | May 1, 2012

It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are “the 9/11 party.” And more than that—and this is the real story here—it’s the fact that the Democrats don’t appear to be afraid of the Republicans anymore. That, to Republicans, is what’s truly unacceptable.

Have you watched the video? Well, . . .do so. It’s hardly capital P political. It’s about how the president is all alone when making such decisions. Bill Clinton provides the narration—a gentlemanly gesture, I thought, since Obama hasn’t always ladled great praise in Bill’s direction. It’s a clever validation, so that it’s not Obama himself or some hired-hand voice-over bragging on the exploit, but one of the few living other men who has occupied that office.

The allegedly controversial turn is taken when the video starts to mount the argument that if Mitt Romney had been president, bin Laden would still be busy keeping those four wives satisfied. The 2007 Romney quote invoked in the ad went: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.” It’s supposed to be outrageous, or something, that the video used only that quote and makes no reference to some clarifying remarks Romney made later that year.

So this is the new standard for political ads—that if a politician said something about Topic X and an ad quotes it, that’s no longer good enough? Suddenly it’s only acceptable if the ad makers scour the record for everything the candidate said and then take care to ensure that the full measure of the candidate’s views is fairly represented? Okay. Let’s hold Romney’s campaign and American Crossroads and all the rest of them to that standard this fall. By the way, what Romney said one month after the initial comments was this: “We’ll move everything to get him. But I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person ... It’s more than Osama bin Laden. But he is going to pay, and he will die.” To the folks at Fox News the Obama ad was under some mystical obligation to note this instance of ass-covering . . .


read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/01/michael-tomasky-how-the-gop-became-a-party-of-whiners-over-osama.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29