Osama, Obama, Bubba and Bush

You know President Obama’s re-election chances are growing dimmer by the day when a new Internet campaign ad is featuring the disgraced and impeached former President Bill Clinton waxing eloquent over Obama’s order to unleash the hounds, sending U.S. Navy Seals to hunt and kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“That’s one thing George Bush said that was right: the president is the decider-in-chief,” says Clinton as photos of an intense and thoughtful Barrack Obama flash by – with pensive music playing in the background.

“Suppose the Navy Seals had gone in there and it hadn’t been bin Laden. Suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him. But he reasoned, ‘I cannot in good conscience do nothing.’ He took the harder and the more honorable path, and the one that produced, in my opinion, the best result,” says Clinton.

This ad flies in the face of every bone-headed presupposition of the Progressive left: First, that George W. Bush was right about anything; second, that enemy combatants are simply criminal defendants who are presumed innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers.

Appearing in the ad must have been particularly galling for Clinton in light of his administration’s refusal to take Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Osman Mohammed Taha’s 1996 offer seriously, “If you want bin Laden, we will give you bin Laden.”

As Clinton admitted in a 2002 speech, “At the time, 1996, he [bin Laden] had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him.”

That September 10th mindset still resonated with Obama when he first assumed the office of president. As his first act, he issued an Executive Order to close the Guantanamo terrorist holding facility by 2010, an act seen by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as a sign America was joining the world “on the path to reason and peace.”

Terrorism was no longer an act of war but a criminal offense for judges, lawyers and juries to grapple over.

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was to be tried in a New York City criminal court, the outrage among Americans and congressional Democrats made the Obama administration think again. Today, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appears destined to cool his heels indefinitely behind the steel doors of his humid Guantanamo cell – in the very manner envisioned by his captor … Bush.

While we’re on the subject of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the day after President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported:

“Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden’s most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.”

“We used this technique [waterboarding] on three people,” said George W. Bush in a 2010 interview appearing on NBC, “We gained value[able] information to protect the country. And it was the right thing to do as far as I’m concerned.”

So, it’s more than a little ironic that the man who let bin Laden slip through his fingers in 1996, costing 3,000 Americans their lives, should appear in a political ad praising the president who’s CIA found bin Laden thanks to Bush-era interrogation methods, which Obama and Eric Holder once considered “torture.”

“The president is the decider-in-chief,” said Bill Clinton. And it’s clear he wasn’t talking about Obama.