Mitt Romney committed a Kinsley gaffe yesterday. It does not please conservatives:
[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.
To this, Byron York says other peoples' lives, military effectiveness, and a big pot of American money are worth trading for a satisfying revenge kill:
I would say a) we have already spent billions and gone to a lot of effort to try to get bin Laden, and b) it would be worth still more money and still more effort to kill the man behind 9/11. I can't imagine any serious Republican candidate for president would say otherwise. Perhaps Romney should watch the tape of the planes hitting the towers again.
Fortunately, though Byron's right that most presidential candidates would never "say otherwise" (and Democrats are especially guilty here) I don't believe that even the most opportunistic politician actually thinks killing Osama bin Laden should be even a secondary priority for our military. And good for Romney for saying so out loud.
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