Thanks to commenter (and ex-blogger) Seixon for catching this. Not a huge deal, but a nice reminder of what a cynical poseur The One is. Here he is last night during the bracelet exchange, sonorously declaring that no soldier dies in vain who follows the orders of his commander-in-chief:

And here’s how poseur ended his 2002 anti-war speech, which remains to this day the biggest/only credential on his foreign-policy resume:

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

How can their sacrifice be in vain if they’re following the orders of the commander-in-chief? It can’t, according to potential commander-in-chief Barack Obama, who’s already thinking about the heat he’ll take from the cretins in his base if he follows through on a build-up in Afghanistan and the casualty numbers start ticking up. State senator Barack Obama was of a different opinion, since his reelection depended upon pandering to the leftist majority in his district. The One occasionally confuses the two, telling a crowd in Iowa early last year that we “have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted” before backing off afterwards and scolding himself for using constituent-inappropriate rhetoric. The joke here, of course, as it was when Diane Sawyer made Pelosi squirm on this same subject, is that the whole point of the left’s moral (as opposed to political) opposition to the war is that they think soldiers are dying needlessly. Even less coherent than “I support the troops but not their mission” is “I believe the occupation is wrong and possibly criminal but the blood being spilled for it is justified.” That’s where they’re at, though, because that’s where they have to be to “reconcile” the things they actually believe with the things they have to pretend to believe to get elected.

If Obama wanted to repudiate his 2002 statement in a coherent way, he could have argued that there’s been so much improvement over the past year in Iraq and so much damage done to Al Qaeda and the Sadrist fundies that even if he thought the sacrifice was in vain before, he doesn’t think so now. Granted, it’s asking a lot to ask him to nuke his biggest/only credential, but why shouldn’t he acknowledge the progress more robustly? After all, we owe the success of the surge to him and Biden, don’t we?