This kind of talk from the President of The United States suggests to me that his advisors are, to put it bluntly, idiots.  To have your president openly suggest his political opponent does not have the chops, the balls, the guts, the ‘moral fiber’ or whatever, to take down someone like bin Laden is a huge political mistake.

It’s just as Peggy Noonan has said, this is a bush league presidency.

The old Washington gossip was that the Obama campaign was too confident, now it is that they are nervous. The second seems true if you go by their inability, months after it was clear Mitt Romney would be running against them, to find and fix on a clear line of attack. Months ago he was the out-of-touch corporate raider. Then he was a flip-flopping weasel. They momentarily shifted to right-wing extremist. This week he seems to be a Bushite billionaire.

That was last week.  This week he is the guy who wouldn’t have taken out the man who brought about the 9/11 attacks.  Really?

And this is where it gets childish and silly, and a transparent attempt to “spike the football” regarding the death of bin Laden.  Normally Republicans are either warmongers (if you served in the military) or chickenhawks (if you did not serve in the military).  In his second term, liberals launched preemptive verbal assaults on President Bush knowing that, if necessary, he would attack Iran to stop them from building a nuclear weapon.  Americans, in general, felt quite sure that he would, and were not sure they wanted such an attack to take place.  Today, of course, we’re still not sure we want such an attack to take place, but neither are we sure that President Obama would launch an attack even if he were certain they had a bomb.

To his credit, President Obama pushed for more troops in Afghanistan and followed Bush’s timeline for withdrawal of troops from Iraq.  But do Americans really believe that a “President Romney” would be unlikely, or even less likely than President Obama, to order the assault against bin Laden?  I’m sure we’ll see a poll conducted on just that question before too much longer.  And let me tell you why the results will be more bad news for the president.

Because Americans have been told over and over by Democrats that Republicans are overly supportive of the military and overly supportive of the defense industry and so very likely to go to war at any excuse.  Right now it’s President Obama vs President Obama.  It’s Democrats vs Democrats.  “Well, Republicans pour billions into defense and love defense contractors and love to go to war.  Except for that Romney, he’s more like us.”

This is a move that will bolster Romney’s election bid, not the President’s.  It’s just so nakedly political and so obviously silly; it makes the president look like a petty politician.  And perhaps that is exactly what he is.