Of the diverse reactions from the Right on the raid that ended Osama bin Laden, one coming from some of the “serious” Republicans is that Obama’s foreign policies are just a continuation of Bush’s policies, so we were right.

You see this opinion in an op ed from Russ Douthat today.

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.

Jed Lewison at Daily Kos points out that Douthat was saying something else entirely less than two months ago, but let’s overlook that for the moment. The “Obama is just another Bush” song has been popular with some of our more cognitively challenged excitable lefties since before Obama was inaugurated, and I suppose it’s noteworthy whenever elements of the Left and Right find agreement with each other.

But how true is the charge? I appreciate that much of what Obama has or has not done has not been different enough from Bush’s policies to suit many people. I’m not entirely happy with his policies, either. But I also see significant differences.

For example, on Guantanamo Bay and torture — the Administration says that failure to close Gitmo is not because Obama agrees with Bush’s policies there, but because Bush’s torture practice left him with some prisoners who can neither be tried nor released. And note that the torture supporters today, including Dick the Dick, are expressing renewed outrage that the Obama Administration is investigating CIA agents who interrogated suspected terrorists. I realize there is plenty of room to criticize what the Obama Administration might be doing with terrorist suspects, and perhaps some could argue there is merely a difference in degree, not in kind. But I disagree that there is no difference at all.

Then there’s a matter of style. In researching what others had to say about Obama’s vs. Bush’s foreign policies, I came across this Foreign Policy blog post from 2009 by Thomas Ricks –

George W. Bush came into office with many of his national security officials thinking that their adversary would be China. The overarching foreign policy task of his administration, some of them thought, would be to manage the rise of China and the decline of Russia. This was reinforced by the EP-3 knockdown incident with China just six weeks into his first term. But nine months into that term, Bush found out different, as Islamic extremism got his notice with acts in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. He reacted, characteristically, with panic. Sometimes that manifested itself as a deer-in-the-headlights look, and at other times as pelvis-thrusting bluster.

I think Obama may be having his own 9/11 moment, finding out that things aren’t gonna go like he planned during the campaign. He came into office, I think, believing that his tasks were to engage or contain Iran, manage the withdrawal from Iraq and change the war in Afghanistan. On Iran, I think, he has done pretty well-trends are certainly pointing toward a multilateral containment effort.

But Obama has done nothing much on Iraq except screw up a couple of appointments there and break a campaign promise to withdraw a brigade a month this year. And on Afghanistan, when told recently what it would take to implement the strategy he announced in March, he appeared to balk. So he reacted, characteristically, I think, by dithering. Some readers of this blog think this looks like leadership, but I disagree–it isn’t leading of you do a multi-month review of Afghan strategy, decide what it is going to be, ask the general in charge how to implement it, and then respond by deciding to review strategy again for a few weeks. Sometimes Obama’s stance manifests itself as professorial pomposity; at other times as repeated policy reviews.

The post is titled “Bush and Obama: Panic vs. Dither.”

The crew at Foreign Policy generally have continued to be critical of Obama policies in Afghanistan, and I can’t say i disagree with them. But I think if recent events have told us anything, it’s that while the President may be willing to take risks, he is not one to rush into situations prematurely. And until then, he holds his cards close to the vest. What looks like dithering may just be caginess.

There is considerable speculation that the President will escalate a troop drawdown in Afghanistan, now that bin Laden is dead. On the other hand, Dick the Dick thinks any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a big mistake. That’s an argument in favor of getting out, I would say.

But I think Ricks made a good point; Bush’s entire foreign policy post 9/11 was based on panic. He and Dick the Dick could strut around and thump their chests with the best of them, but that’s about all they could do. So many of their decisions — from the invasion of Iraq to the torture — were born of emotion rather than rational thinking.

President Obama, on the other hand, is the Ice Man. He thinks things through. You (and I) may still disagree with his conclusions, but he doesn’t panic easily.

Michael Hirsch has a column at The Atlantic pointing out the differences in he way Bush and Obama have handled Iraq. Do go and read it; I think it makes a clear argument that Obama’s and Bush’s policies in Iraq are entirely different. Among other things, Hirsch writes,

Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations–a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists. From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.

If only that had been the case after 9/11. See also P.M. Carpenter.

As the Talking Dog says, it’s a rare day when Michael Moore and John Yoo agree with each other.

I agree with Michael Moore that the interests of history, the rule of law, truth, justice, and what used to be the American Way (I understand even Superman has given up on that) would have been far better served by taking Osama bin Laden into custody and putting him on trial. I do not entirely agree with Moore’s apparent implication (I don’t have a direct link to what he said; just the Newsbusters version of it) that killing OBL rather than capturing him was the plan all along, however.

I imagine that taking OBL out of the compound alive would have been trickier, and more dangerous to the SEALs, than just shooting him. And soldiers are not policemen, who are required to make shoot/don’t shoot judgments in ambiguous situations. As I understand it, with soldiers, unless the subject clearly and unambiguously surrenders, they’re going to kill him. That’s what they’re trained to do.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit if we learn someday that President Obama ordered the SEALs to kill OBL rather than arrest him. A dead OBL is an achievement; a living one would soon turn into the Mother of All Bones of Political Contention. America is no longer a country that can sensibly discuss anything and come to rational decisions. If OBL were alive and in custody now, any decisions the President might make about what to do with him would be relentlessly attacked by the Right and used against him in the 2012 election. The President is a politician, after all.

Even as it is, many on the Right are doing their best to stir up animosity about killing OBL. They’re calling him a wimp for not releasing the bleeping photographs of OBL’s corpse; they’re attacking him for daring to accept credit for the raid. Note yesterday’s flap du jour, in which the Right persuaded itself that the President had ordered the removal of a flag at Ground Zero (not true) and spent much of the day worked up into a snit about it. I doubt much of this is getting traction outside of teabag world, but again, there aren’t a lot of ambiguities to exploit about a corpse. The righties certainly are being creative with what little they’ve got to exploit, though.

I can also imagine that a live OBL would have prompted the usual lunatics to publicly burn multiple effigies of him and demand a public hanging, providing lots of inflammatory videos to be aired on Middle Eastern television. There is concern that killing OBL will inspire retaliation by jihadists — like they weren’t after us, anyway — but a live one in custody might be just as inflammatory. Possibly more inflammatory, over the long run.

Yoo said that OBL should have been captured alive and used as a source of intelligence (i.e., taken to Gitmo and waterboarded; see what Krugman says about that). For a whole lot of reasons I would have turned him over to an international court for a public Nuremberg-type trial; trials and intelligence are not mutually exclusive.

Frankly, as a nation, I don’t think we would have been capable of giving OBL a fair and honest trial without tearing each other to shreds in the process. We may not even be capable of giving him a fair trial as a species. We’re not civilized enough yet, apparently.

The deadline for filing recall election petitions in Wisconsin has passed, and as of now six Republicans and three Democrats are subject to recall. At least some of the elections are being scheduled for July 12, I understand.

However, the Dems are challenging the recall petitions filed by Republicans, saying many of the signatures were obtained (by paid out-of-state operatives) through fraudulent means. Eric Kleefeld explains,

The Dems rolled rolled out their official complaint on Thursday, after making phone calls to almost 1,800 petition-signers, and acquiring affidavits from signers who say they were falsely told that the petitions were for other things — such as supporting a local park, recalling a Republican state senator in a different district, or recalling Gov. Scott Walker.

The Dems also challenge that some of the signatures are fakes. The total number of legitimate signatures would not be enough to warrant the three recall elections, the Dems say.

Also note that in a special election held this past week, a Democrat won a seat that had been held by Republicans for 17 years. The former occupant had left the legislature to work for the Scott Walker administration.

Is anyone else watching the O’Donnell-Rice interview on MSNBC? Unbelievable. That woman couldn’t tell the truth if you asked her what time it is.

Update: If you missed it, you can watch it here. I recommend taking a stiff drink first.

Several Republican politicians have used the hoopla over OBL’s death to quietly drop the scheme to privatize Medicare. Brian Beutler writes,

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is the latest GOP leader to acknowledge that his party’s plan to privatize Medicare — which passed the House as part of the Republican budget — will hit a wall in the White House and Senate.

Responding Thursday to the news that one of his most powerful chairmen, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) of the House Ways and Means Committee, will not push ahead with the Medicare plan, Boehner told reporters, “My interpretation of what Mr. Camp [said] was a recognition of the political realities that we face. While Republicans control the House, the Democrats control the Senate and they control the White House.”

Translation: This thing is going to kill us in the 2012 elections.

Some of them actually are making noises about cooperation.

Senior Republicans conceded Wednesday that a deal is unlikely on a contentious plan to overhaul Medicare and offered to open budget talks with the White House by focusing on areas where both parties can agree, such as cutting farm subsidies.

However,

On the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Biden, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) said Republicans remain convinced that reining in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nation’s finances over the long term.

Translation: Are there no prisons? Are there no work houses?

That search could start, Cantor said, with a list of GOP proposals that would save $715 billion over the next decade by ending payments to wealthy farmers, limiting lawsuits against doctors, and expanding government auctions of broadcast spectrum to telecommunications companies, among other items.

Limiting lawsuits against doctors ain’t going to do squat to lower the federal deficit. And “wealthy farmers” is an oxymoron, unless you’re talking about corporate factory farms. But any plan Republicans might come up with won’t end payments to anything “corporate.”

But this is relatively picayune stuff. Reading the entire article, I get the impression some Republicans are fishing for some token concessions to give them some cover from the baggers for voting to raise the debt ceiling.

Elsewhere –

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged Thursday that Republican plans to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law were “dead.” Instead, Camp predicted, the GOP would turn its focus to overturning the most controversial portion of that legislation: the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance.

I still predict that won’t happen, because the insurance industry likes that mandate.

Speaking of which, one little-noticed feature of the apparently dead Ryan Medicare plan is … an individual mandate. Simon Lazarus explains — the Ryan plan would have changed the tax code so that people who didn’t purchase insurance would have faced a tax penalty. which, bottom line, is what the evil individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act does. Rightie bloggers object to this characterization of the Ryan plan, saying the plan provided for a tax incentive, not a tax penalty.

In other words, under the Dem plan the glass is half empty, but under the Ryan plan, it is half full.

Stuff to read — how the Affordable Care Act already is changing the insurance industry, and Loony-ass Insurgents vs. Waffling Bores: GOP Presidential Fight Starts Tonight!

An editorial in the New York Times, “The Myth of Obama’s Weakness.”

The baseless critique of Mr. Obama as a frightened lamb among the world’s wolves was started in the 2008 campaign when Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton derided his ability to manage world affairs. “It’s got to do with experience, knowledge and judgment,” Mr. McCain said, “none of which Senator Obama has.” …

… But just as releasing a birth certificate marginalized one falsehood, Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image abroad.

Ah, never say never. Like the belief the President was born in Kenya, the belief that the President is a wimp refuses to die.

Yesterday I spotted this headline from the British tabloid, The Daily Mail: “Obama took SIXTEEN HOURS to make up his mind about Bin Laden mission.” Beneath the deadline was a blurb: “President ‘slept on it’ as tense military chiefs awaited decision.”

This does jive with the account given in Time magazine, but somehow it sounds different in Time:

The decision to attack had been made days earlier by the President. He gathered his senior intelligence, military and diplomatic team together in the Situation Room on Thursday afternoon to hear his options. …

… The intelligence professionals said they did not know for sure that bin Laden was in the compound. The case was good, but circumstantial. The likelihood, officials told the President, was between 50% and 80%. No slam dunk. Obama went around the table asking everyone to state their opinion. He quizzed his staff about worst case scenarios–the possibility of civilian casualties, a hostage situation, a diplomatic blow-up with Pakistan, a downed helicopter. He was presented with three options: Wait to gather more intelligence, attack with targeted bombs from the air, or go in on the ground with troops. The room was divided about 50-50, said a person in the room. …

… Obama left the meeting without signaling his intent. He wanted to sleep on it. At about 8:00 a.m. on Friday, just before he boarded a helicopter that would take him to tour tornado damage in Alabama, Obama called his senior aides into the Diplomatic Room. He told them his decision: A helicopter assault. At that point, the operation was taken out of his hands. He was trusting the fate of his presidency to luck.

Of course, it was a difficult decision. Lives were at stake, not to mention a presidency. The case for doing the mission was not clear cut. It was not at all unreasonable for the President to take a few hours to decide.

But merely by popping out the words “sixteen hours,” the Daily Mail kept hope alive, never mind that the Daily Mail is mostly known for losing libel suits to defamed celebrities. Thanks to the capitalization of some letters, wingnuts could still call the President a wimp.

Since then, from somewhere in the rightie hive mind has come the fiction that President Obama wasn’t even involved in the decision to raid the compound –

“What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound.”

This site claims to have solid information from a “Washington Insider” — who remains unnamed, of course — that President Obama could not make a decision, but was “overruled” by “military/intelligence officials,” and the actual decision to raid the compound was made by Leon Panetta.

I rather doubt the director of the CIA has the authority to order Navy SEALs to so much as make lunch, but let’s not let reality get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, eh?

The usual loons — Pam Geller et al. — are adding their own unique details to this story. Soon they’ll be saying that the President had to be locked in the basement for several hours so that he couldn’t get word to bin Laden to leave the compound. The birthers are becoming wimpers.

As I wrote in the last post, it’s impossible to know if the death of bin Laden will have much if any impact on the 2012 elections. Eighteen or so months is an eternity in politics. The economy, for good or ill, probably will be the biggest single factor in how people choose to vote. But I think Michael Tomasky has a good point here –

First, the obvious: Obama is certainly a stronger president today than he was two days ago. I watched the ceremony today in which he bestowed posthumous medals of honor on two US servicemen who fought in the Korean war. The tributes to these two men, both of whom sacrificed their lives to save their men, would have been sincere and moving in any case.

But in the present context, I couldn’t help but think: for those families, for all the military people in that room, for all the US military people in this country and around the world, Obama has a degree of credibility now that he’d lacked before. He’s not a military man, not steeped in military culture. That’s all still true. But now it’s basically canceled out. He got bin Laden. Period stop. An utterly un-rebuttable statement of strength.

And I think we will see as more details come out, indeed as we have already seen, that a big part of this operation’s success had to do with Obama himself. The national-security meetings he ran, the questions he asked, the decisions he made. I don’t want bombs, he said; I don’t want to kill children while we do this, and I don’t want a leg there and a hand there. I want a body, and I want proof, before America and (more importantly) a possibly doubting world.

Many are pointing out that the raid, as carried out, was a politically risky move for the President. President Carter had sent special ops troops in helicopters to rescue the hostages in Iran. That mission failed big time, and the failure cemented public opinion of Carter as a hapless wimp, paving the way for the election of “tall in the saddle” Ronald Reagan.

Righties like to compare President Obama to President Carter. But now, having succeeded where Bush failed, Republicans have to adjust their rhetoric or risk appearing ridiculous.

Jonathan Martin wrote,

The arc of the last week illustrated what so many Republicans fear may prevent them from re-capturing the White House next year. In the span of 100 hours, the spectacle of a national discussion over President Obama’s long-form birth certificate—sparked by the pronouncements of a real estate developer who doubles as a reality show celebrity—gave way to a moment of utmost seriousness, defined by the president’s somber delivery of history-making news.

The GOP establishment, Martin says, hopes that the week’s events will sober up the field and drive out the “clown candidates.” There’s a Republican primary debate in South Carolina on Thursday and it will be interesting to see what the candidates do.

The larger point is that, while the death of bin Laden might not be a front-burner issue in 2012, it certainly has changed the trajectory of U.S. politics in President Obama’s favor.

See also Dan Froomkin, “Obama Succeeded Where Bush Failed.”

I’ve been surfing around this morning looking at reactions to the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death. The executive summary: Hooray! followed by But it will make no difference in the 2012 elections. The campaign next year will focus on domestic issues, not terrorism.

See Nate Silver’s analysis of the political implications of the death of bin Laden, with which I largely agree. President Obama should get a boost in popularity that will disappear before election day 2012.

On the other hand, rightfully or not, the death of bin Laden ought to bolster public perception of President Obama as a serious commander in chief and someone who is “tough” on national security. This will be reinforced in a few weeks when we observe the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

It strikes me that none of the likely Republican nominees has much in the way of real or imagined national security credentials. I don’t think any of them served in the military or is associated in the public mind with any past national security crisis. And one of them is named “Tim.”

This event serves as a reminder to the public that the job of president is serious and requires more than just an ability to insult Democrats.

And while Sarah Palin and others can stand on the sidelines and belittle Obama’s foreign policies (which I do not necessarily endorse myself) all they like, as Nate says the death of bin Laden “neuters” the issue. Their whines and tweets and chest thumpings seem all the more pathetic now.

How will the Right respond? I predict they will belittle Obama for taking credit for the death of bin Laden in his speech last night. It was U.S. forces that did the job, they will say, not President Obama. They will probably try to give credit to George W. Bush somehow, with a nod to President Reagan. See also Steve M. I think most voters will perceive this posturing as sour grapes, though.

This is not to say that future events couldn’t change the current political dynamic, and drastically. It also is not to say that killing bin Laden changes anything in the real world at this point. He’s been more of a symbolic figure than a real leader for several years.

Update: Great photographs of the celebration in lower Manhattan.

Update: Fox News congratulates George W. Bush on death of bin Laden.

Update: Little Lulu slams President Obama for receiving credit for death of bin Laden.

Update: Recalling some 2008 campaign talking points.

Update: I see The Donald thinks the President’s remarks about him were “inappropriate.” Unreal. But Glenn Reynold’s comment is even funnier:

SUCKER: Obama takes bait, embiggens Donald Trump. You don’t punish Donald Trump by giving him attention. A more experienced politician would know that. Nor is building Trump up good for Obama — Trump has actually hurt him more than all the others combined.

Um, on what planet?