Vice President Joseph Biden on Monday night upped the ante around the already quite-dramatic assassination of Osama bin Laden.
From the pool report of Biden's comments during a fundraising event in New Jersey come these quotes.You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.
President Bush ordered Special Forces into Afghanistan weeks after 9/11. Read Horse Soldiers if you want audacious. President Bush ordered the surge in Iraq at a time when the entire Democratic Party (and many Republicans) wanted to cut and run. That was audacious. Obama ordering the raid that got Osama... not so much.
Look, don't get me wrong. It was great that the Seals got bin Laden. But President Obama's role in that was literally a formality. Any President, given good intelligence that the location of Osama bin Laden was known to a sufficient degree of probability, would have made the same call. Bush. Gore. Kerry. Clinton. I would have made the same call. You would have made the same call. Part of this is based on the nature of the decision... by the time it even gets to the President's desk, the intelligence has been checked and re-checked and re-re-checked, and the plan has been checked and re-checked and re-re-checked at multiple levels by people with much greater familiarity (of necessity) with the facts, capabilities, and tactics than the President.
As for Slow Joe... 500 years, really? You mean Washington Crossing the Delaware wasn't more audacious? Lee's invasion of the North culminating in Gettysburg? Sherman's March? The Doolittle Raid? D-Day? The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The Raid on Entebbe?
And yet these people think they're so much smarter than the rest of us rubes.