TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Peter Feaver on the Obama campaign’s bin Laden advertisement:

The critique of Romney was fundamentally dishonest in the way that campaign ads often are. The ad cherry-picked Romney quotes and deployed them out of context. The valid Romney observation that defeating al Qaeda would require a comprehensive strategy, not one limited to hunting down a single man, got distorted by the Obama scriptwriters into a hesitation to pursue Bin Laden. And the valid Romney observation that it was a mistake to boast in advance about conducting unilateral strikes against the territory of our Pakistani partner got distorted into an unwillingness to act in America’s national interest.

Republicans have been angry, as expected, and Democrats have responded that the right’s sudden righteousness on political advertisements is a bit rich considering the Bush campaign’s proclivity for using national security as a club to beat Kerry over the head in 2004, which is true.

But wasn’t Obama supposed to be above this kind of crap? It was Obama, after all, that spoke of learning to “disagree without being disagreeable” when he announced his candidacy in 2007. I suppose those words don’t matter much when there’s an election to win, though. Change we can believe in, I guess.