The Hill reports that House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) invoked the memory of 9/11 victims to argue against military spending cuts:

“We honor those who fell 11 years ago today. We honor those who fought to try to save some of those who died,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said in a press conference following a closed-door conference meeting. “The best thing that we can do as a people to honor those individuals is to make sure that it never happens again, and we have looming massive defense cuts that this House has acted to substitute.”

The “looming massive” cuts Cantor refers to is the nearly $500 billion military spending sequester mandated by the Budget Control Act. There are perhaps a variety of reasons that (mainly) Republicans warn against these cuts but Cantor is moving into different territory by using the memory of 9/11 victims to make his case.

The reality is that, while the arbitrary automatic cuts probably aren’t the best way to reduce the Pentagon’s bloated budget (there are alternatives), the military spending sequester would bring DOD’s baseline budget back to 2006 levels.

An adviser to Mitt Romney referred to foreign policy as a “distraction” in this year’s presidential election. While President Obama’s campaign continues to focus on the administration’s foreign policy successes and the lack of national security experience from the Romney ticket, Romney aide Robert O’Brien accused the Obama campaign of “going from one shiny object to the next:”

The Romney campaign, however, doesn’t think national security is a winning issue for Obama.

Romney foreign policy advisor Robert O’Brien called the Obama campaign’s tactic a transparent ploy to distract from the sagging economy, including a recent jobs report that was “a disaster for them.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that they’re raising foreign policy because it’s another distraction from the Administration’s terrible economic record,” O’Brien told BuzzFeed. “They’re going from one shiny object to the next.”

Romney has received widespread criticism — even from leading Republicans — for ignoring U.S. troops and the war in Afghanistan in his speech to the Republican National Convention.

But O’Brien’s claim that foreign policy is a distraction squares with a wider theme of Romney’s campaign. Another adviser told the New York Times back in May that “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office.” While it seems clear that the so-called “Cheney-ites” are running things behind the scenes, Romney has avoided much public discussion of foreign policy. Even his own advisers and supporters have no idea what Romney’s foreign policy is and his recent foreign trip that was supposed to be a slam dunk in beefing up his security bona fides bombed, spawning the not-so-flattering moniker “Romney Shambles.”

On the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of taking “sole credit” for the killing of Osama bin Laden and ignoring his presidential daily intelligence briefings. “If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told the Daily Caller on Monday night, quoting a report by former Bush administration official Marc Thiessen that “charged that Obama had attended fewer than half of the presidential daily briefs since taking office.”

But by parroting the claims of Birther-led “Swift Boater” groups, who argue that Obama has overstated his role in the bin Laden raid, Cheney ignores Obama’s repeated efforts to credit the intelligence community and the Bush administration for playing a part in the successful mission to kill the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks. As Obama explained earlier this year:

[L]ast year, when we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden, I made it clear that our success was due to many people in many organizations working together over many years — across two administrations. That’s why my first call once American forces were safely out of harm’s way was to President Bush. Because protecting our country is neither the work of one person, nor the task of one period of time, it’s an ongoing obligation that we all share.

Obama also continues to receive intelligence information on a daily basis, even if he prefers to read the analyses himself rather than have it read told to him. As National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor told Politico, Obama “receives and reads his [Presidential Daily Brief] every day, and most days when he’s at the White House receives a briefing in person. When necessary he probes the arguments, requests more information or seeks alternate analysis. Sometimes that’s via a written assessment and other times it’s in person…Marc basically wrote a story culled from our public schedule that shows how Marc’s old boss, President Bush, structured his day differently than President Obama.”