Failed Senator Rick Santorum: Asshole of the Week

"9/11 families and everybody else in America should be furious at this president that he’s walking around taking credit for, you know, getting Osama bin Laden. He didn’t get Osama bin Laden!"

-- Santorum, on Hate Radio today.

When I first heard the early reports that bin Laden had been killed, I thought it would end up being from something akin to a drone attack and that Obama had little-or-no involvement in the operation. Don't get me wrong -- this still would have been a huge victory for the President even if his actual involvement was minimal.

But that wasn't the case. This victory stemmed directly from a policy he put into place, namely, a reversal of George Bush's "We Don't Think About bin Laden Much" Policy to a policy that made the capture/killing of Osama our top priority. Bush's policy was based at least in part on the notion that bin Laden had been maginalized in a cave somewhere and wasn't involved much in al Qaeda's operations. But the intelligence obtained from the raid is showing that he was still very involved in al Qaeda's operations. It is merely icing on the cake for me that Obama kept close tabs on this operation from the beginning and gave the final order to proceed.

This was a huge political risk for the President on several levels. Had this mission failed, folks like the Asshole Santorum would have been calling not only for Obama's impeachment, but also for his execution and deportation. Had this mission failed, there would have been a huge backlash from the Pakistanis instead of the huge embarrassment now being experienced by these so-called "allies." The President's advisors were telling him that the operation only had about a 68% chance of success, but Obama decided to pull the trigger anyway.

I don't think our Commander-in-Chief is taking enough personal credit for the killing of bin Laden, given that a failed operation would have turned Obama into the new millenium's version of President Jimmy Carter. Obama did in less than two-and-a-half years what Bush and Cheney couldn't do in eight. And don't forget: the 9/11 attacks happened on Bush and Cheney's watch -- even though the outgoing Clinton people told the incoming Bush people eight months prior to September 11, 2001 that Al Qaeda would be their top national security priority -- and that Bush himself was warned a month before 9/11 that bin Laden was "determined to strike within the U.S."

The GOP is clearly weak when it comes to national defense. To hell with the notion that the killing of Osama transcends party politics. I openly question the Republican Party's ability to keep this country safe.