The boss digs it but I’m ambivalent, just like I was about that “Dear Mr. Obama” video last year that everyone else flipped for. It’s a hawk’s version of the left’s Absolute Moral Authority fallacy, where validity is ascribed to some sympathetic victim’s stance on policy simply because they’re a victim. (The ultimate example: Cindy Sheehan.) How many lefty military wives were relieved yesterday to have The One try to dial down tensions with Muslims, thinking it might spare their husbands an attack by jihadis that otherwise would have taken place? Also, in fairness, The One didn’t “apologize” for the war. He said it was a war of choice, that opinions differed, that it reminds us of the value of diplomacy, but that he’s glad Saddam’s gone and that we owe it to Iraq to help them rebuild. In a speech with multiple lame passages, that was hardly the lamest.

Even so, note this question: “So if [my husband] goes out there, does he die in vain?” Answer, according to Obama’s logic: Yes. I devoted an entire post to that idea during the campaign, and then a follow-up a few weeks later. He explicitly said, in the very last line of his famous 2002 anti-war speech, “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.” Fast forward six years, after he became the Democratic nominee, and suddenly he’d decided that no soldier who follows the orders of his commander-in-chief — like, say, George W. Bush — ever dies in vain. The two concepts are irreconcilable; the only way to explain the change is the fact that The One was himself vying to be C-in-C and knew that voters wouldn’t trust him if he went around telling grieving families that their sons had died for nothing. That should have been an early warning to the anti-war crowd that he was willing to sell them out for political advantage. Mission accomplished, no pun intended.