"How dare you point out that I was wrong?" (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Mitt Romney
in April 2007 dismissing the importance of bringing Osama bin Laden to justice:
[Romney] said the country would be safer by only “a small percentage” and would see “a very insignificant increase in safety” if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney said.
As conservative writer Byron York
said at the time: "Perhaps Romney should watch the tape of the planes hitting the towers again." Apparently Romney didn't, because when then-Senator Barack Obama said he would order strikes within Pakistan against targets like Osama bin Laden with or without the support of the Pakistani government, Romney
slammed him:
"I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don't think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort," Romney told reporters on the campaign trail. [...] Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is one of the Republican front-runners, said U.S. troops "shouldn't be sent all over the world." He called Obama's comments "ill-timed" and "ill-considered."
But now that Obama's strategy succeeded, Romney's campaign
says it's wrong for the Obama campaign
to point out that Romney opposed it:
"The killing of Osama bin Laden was a momentous day for all Americans and the world, and Governor Romney congratulated the military, our intelligence agencies, and the President,” Saul said in a statement. "It’s now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us, in order to try to distract voters’ attention from the failures of his administration."
Earth to Romneyland: This has nothing to do with distracting voters from anything. It's about focusing their attention on a major achievement.
And if it was okay for Mitt Romney to say getting bin Laden wasn't important and it was okay for him to attack Barack Obama's strategy, then it's also okay for Barack Obama's campaign to point out Mitt Romney was wrong and Obama was right. That's not dividing America—that's pointing out the truth. And it's not our problem that for Mitt Romney, the truth hurts.