There was a time when Republicans would tag the Democrats as national-security wimps, and Democrats would quake in their boots. But those days are over, as evidenced by President Obama's Tuesday news conference.
Asked to comment on the latest rhetoric from the campaign trail -- where Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich call him weak on Iran; where Romney says Iran will obtain "the bomb" if Obama wins in November -- the president laid out the case for heightened diplomatic pressure.
Then he segued into an extended smackdown of his rivals, worth quoting in full:
"What's said on the campaign trail -- those folks don't have a lot of responsibilities. They're not commander in chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I'm reminded of the costs involved in war. I'm reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.
"This is not a game. There's nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we've been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that's more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.
"Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven't launched a war. If some of these folks think that it's time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk."
A few minutes later, he resumed: "I do think that anytime we consider military action that the American people understand there's going to be a price to pay. ... Sometimes we bear that cost. But we think it through. We don't play politics with it. When we have in the past -- when we haven't thought it through and it gets wrapped up in politics -- we make mistakes. And typically, it's not the folks who are popping off who pay the price."
"When we have in the past" -- that was a reference to Iraq, a reminder that a decade ago, Republican neoconservatives railed about weapons of mass destruction and hurled us into a bloody trillion-dollar war without having thought it through. A decade ago, most Democrats were so terrified of the wimp tag that they signed on. But Obama on Tuesday showed he wasn't cowed, that the warmongers no longer run the show.
