Mitt Romney doesn’t like it that President Obama’s re-election campaign in a new video decided to tout the president’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and to question — based on his comments from 2007 — whether Romney would have done the same thing. Here’s Romney complaining about the video ad on CBS this morning:

ROMNEY: And the idea to try to politicize this, and to say, “oh, I, President Obama would have done it one way and Mitt Romney would have done it another,” is really disappointing. Let’s not make the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden a politically divisive event. There are plenty of differences between President Obama and myself. But let’s not make up ones based on, “Well he might not have done this.” It’s disappointing and it’s unfortunate and it’s taking an event that really brought America together.

Back in 2004, President Bush ran a smear campaign against challenger Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) which undermined his service in Vietnam and questioned Kerry’s ability and determination to protect the United States — just three years removed from the 9/11 attacks — from another terror strike. “If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” then Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

And while Romney complains about Obama’s alleged “politicization” now, he willfully participated in the Bush-Cheney smear campaign on Kerry in 2004. During an August 9, 2004 (accessed via Lexis/Nexis) interview on Fox News, Romney suggested that Kerry would “twiddle his thumbs” when dealing with terrorism and in September 2004, also on Fox News, Romney said Kerry is too much of a flip-flopper to protect the country:

ROMNEY: [M]ost has already been said about John Kerry. I think people know pretty well that he’s a guy who has a hard time finding which side of a position to come down on. But I’m going to focus on the fact that our nation needs strong leadership. We’re under attack, militarily, economically. Our very way of life is under attack. And we need to have the kind of steady, strong leadership, which is represented by Dick Cheney, and by of course, President George W. Bush.

In his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, Romney said “America is under attack from almost every direction,” later adding, “On the just war our brave soldiers are fighting to protect free people everywhere, there is no question: George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First’ crowd is wrong.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also notes that during his speech at the 2008 RNC, Romney “blasted Obama as untrustworthy when it comes to combating ‘the threat from radical, violent jihad,’ which he contrasted with John McCain, who, apparently unlike Obama, understands that ‘radical, violent Islam is evil,’ and will do everything he can to defeat it.”

“Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is ‘politicizing’ an important national event,” Jon Meacham writes today, noting that Obama’s alleged “politicizing” might be a bit different from what the GOP knows. “In this sense,” Meacham writes, “‘politicizing’ might be best translated as ‘beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.’”

President Obama’s campaign, in a new web video touting the decision to get Osama bin Laden, called attention to Mitt Romney’s claim in 2007 that Obama was wrong to say that he would strike al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth” trying to get bin Laden, Romney said at the time.

Romney’s push back is that anyone would have made the same decision that Obama made in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound last year. “Any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing,” Romney said today. One problem with that argument is that Vice President Biden and then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates advised Obama against taking the course he chose on the bin Laden raid.

Top Romney surrogate John McCain (R-AZ) used a similar line last night on Fox News. “I say any president, Jimmy Carter, anybody, any president would have obviously under those circumstances done the same thing,” McCain said. When host Bill O’Reilly pointed out that Biden would not have, McCain’s response was basically, “eh, anybody but Biden”:

MCCAIN: Biden is the same one that said we should divide Iraq into three countries. Biden is the same one that said Desert Storm would be another Vietnam. Biden has — has been consistently wrong on every national security issue that I’ve been involved in in the last 20 years or so. So, I wouldn’t use Biden as a bellwether.

Watch the clip:

So Biden should not be brought into this debate because he may have gotten some things wrong. If that’s the measure, than McCain has been irrelevant for many, many years.

In National Review, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson — two key figures in the Islamophobia network discussed in CAP’s 2011 Fear, Inc report — write that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) “has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office”:

In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

A perusal of the authors’ case against Christie reveals it as comically weak, full of highly questionable characterizations and buttressed by links that don’t actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to. In a typical example, they criticize Christie for voicing support for Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, “on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas.” They do not mention that the hearing resulted in Qatanani being cleared of charges.

Pipes and Emerson knock Christie for his concern over revelations of the New York City Police Department’s spying on New Jersey Muslims, suggesting that he should’ve shown “gratitude” for the NYPD operating outside its jurisdiction.

And of course the authors take special offense at Christie’s bold defense of New Jersey state superior court judge Sohail Mohammed against attacks by anti-Islam activists, in which Christie offered the most cogent summation of the anti-sharia movement on record: “It’s crap. It’s just crazy.”

Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.

While Pipes and Emerson fail to demonstrate that Chris Christie has an “Islam problem,” they succeed in demonstrating that National Review still has an Islamophobia problem. Last month the magazine took important steps to rid itself of two writers who had expressed bigoted views toward African-Americans. It’s long past time that National Review do the same with those of its writers expressing similar views toward Muslim Americans.

Mitt Romney hasn’t appreciated the fact that President Obama’s campaign released a new video pointing out that Romney said in 2007 that he would not order military action similar to the one Obama ordered that ended up killing Osama bin Laden.

Romney now says that “of course” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account. “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is, the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were.

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.