Give me a break!

POTUS said today  that deciding to take out bin Laden was "the hardest decision I've had to make as Commander-in-Chief."

The flies promptly started to buzz.

First, if a president had the intelligence break Obama had and had failed to act on it, and that fact had become public knowledge, he would have had as much chance of being re-elected as Richard Nixon would have if he had made his "I am not a crook" speech during his first term, and in drag, with Ed Muskie instead of George McGovern as his opponent.

Secondly, if the slam-dunk attempt had been made, and had somehow failed, he still would have suffered minimal damage, if any. I find it hard to believee that this was the first attempt to get bin Laden made by the current administration. Bush suffered little political damage from the near-miss at Tora Bora. Admittedly it was before 9/11, but Clinton suffered no damage from his half-hearted, lob-a-cruise-missile-at-where-he-used-to-be attempt to take OBL out.

I watched a Yale history professor pontificate on POTUS's "courage" in making this decision last night on PBS, invoking Jimmy Carter's silly attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran. Carter suffered the political damage he did, not because the attempt failed, but because it should never have been made. It was based on a Rube Goldberg abortion of a plan that had so little realistic possibility of success that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned before the attempt was even made, in protest over the fact that Carter was foolish enough to give the OK. Carter deservedly took the lumps he took because that silly and ill-conceived mission summed up the incompetence and futility of his entire administration. It encapsulated the entire  presidency of a man whose stewardship of the nation's destiny was so well illustrated by that famous photo of the President of the United States and leader of the free world dauntlessly wielding a paddle in the defense of his boat against the onslaught of an attack bunny.

Courage? Give me a break. Obama had no option than to authorize this operation. And he had the chance purely because it was on his watch that the intelligence break that revealed bin Laden's location happened.

If, on the other hand, President Obama had attempted to take out bin Laden on the basis of the information he had, and it had somehow failed, the American people would still have given him credit for trying. It would not have forgiven him for failing to do so.

That said, Mr. Obama was, in fact, the president when the intelligence break happened. He was, in fact, the president who gave the order. He was, in fact, the president under whom we finally got bin Laden, and he deserves due credit for that fact.

But let's not push it.