Biden, Bin Laden, Obama, Osama:
Okay, one more piece of ancient history that all of a sudden seems rhetorically relevant. It's a 1980 commercial from the Reagan/Bush campaign and a group of traitorous bastards named "Democrats for Reagan." It's one that Karl Rove could have written. Amid predictable images of chanting, evil Iranians, a B-movie announcer intones, "In a copyrighted story in the New York Times on October 27th, William Safire wrote: 'The smoothest of Iran's diplomatic criminals was shown on American television this weekend, warning American voters that they had better not elect Ronald Reagan. Ayatollah Khomeini and his men prefer a weak and manageable U.S. president, and have decided to do everything in their power to determine our election result.' A reminder from Democrats for Reagan."

Safire also wrote, a week later, "I like to think that voters will it as they see it, Carter or Reagan or Anderson, unmanipulated by the religious fanatic who hates us all." That bit of wisdom never made it into an ad.

The Rude Pundit brings this up because of this moment on Meet the Press with David Gregory's Bowl-Cut yesterday. Interviewing Vice President Joe Biden, who was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several times, Gregory asked, "There was a bizarre moment this week with the release of these letters from Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was hiding. And at one point he, he talks about his desire to kill President Obama , leaving you in power because he concluded you'd be, quote, 'totally unprepared to lead.' How, how did that sit with you? I mean, you had to come across that."

The actual quote from a Osama letters (subtitle: "An Extraordinary Correspondence") is about concentrating attacks on visiting American officials. "They are not to target visits by US Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman)Mullen, or the Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Holbrook. The groups will remain on the lookout for Obama or Petraeus. The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there. Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis." You got that? One way to spin this is that bin Laden feared President Obama. Another way would be to use this whenever anyone says that Obama is a secret Mooo-slim.

To his credit, Biden answered diplomatically. He didn't look at Gregory and say, "Are you fucking serious? I'm supposed to answer a dead terrorist's opinion of me? Here's how that sits with me: Blow me. No, not bin Laden, but you, David. Blow me."

This is of a piece with the swift boating of the President being undertaken by outside groups, who are attacking Obama for using the death of Osama bin Laden as a demonstration of his foreign policy successes and abilities. Gregory, quoting the ever-reliable New York Post, asked Biden, "Was all of this together in effect his 'Mission Accomplished' moment?" Again, Biden could have grabbed Gregory by his tie and gritted his teeth in that Biden way and said, "Listen, motherfucker. Here's the difference: we actually accomplished the mission." But, alas, he did not.

You can be assured that if bin Laden was still free, Republicans would have been running nonstop ads about how Obama hadn't captured him and how bin Laden was plotting right now to shoot down your airplanes and make your women wear burqas. But that strategy is out the window, so all they can do is go with this bullshit "spiking the ball" thing.

Hey, you know who else spiked the ball? Ike. Yep, in his reelection campaign in 1956, President Eisenhower used his ending the Korean War as a reason to vote for him. That ad asked, among other things, "Can we dismiss the man who has kept us at peace, and take a chance on a man untried and inexperienced in international negotiations and world problems? What do you say? Are you willing to bet everything you love and hold dear that [Adlai] Stevenson can also keep us out of war? Are you that sure of it?" How is that Republican strategy any different than Obama asking what Romney would have done?

There you go, Obama campaign. Ike's got your back. Oh, and you know where the ad begins? At a football game. Where there's end zones. Where one...