Is anyone really surprised by Colin Powell’s re-endorsement of Barack Obama? CBS asked the question during This Morning, and Powell almost seems reluctant to spit the words out, but it’s not much of a shocker:

Powell went on to explain his reasoning:

“When he took over the country was in very, very difficult straits. We were in the one of the worst recessions we had seen in recent times, close to a depression. The fiscal system was collapsing. Wall Street was in chaos, we had 800,000 jobs lost in that first month of the Obama Administration and unemployment peaked at 10 percent. So we were in real trouble. The auto industry was collapsing, the housing was started to collapse and we were in very difficult straits. And I saw over the next several years stabilization come back in the financial community, housing is now starting to come back after four years, it’s starting to pick up. Consumer confidence is rising.” …

Summarizing the past four years under Obama, Powell said “Generally, we’ve come out of the dive and we’re starting to gain altitude.” He added, “The unemployment rate is too high, people are still hurting in housing but I see that we’re starting to raise up.”

Turning to foreign policy, Powell said he saw “the president got us out of one war, start to get us out of a second war and did not get us into any new wars. And finally I think that the actions he has taken with respect to protecting us from terrorism have been very very solid. And so, I think we ought to keep on the track that we are on.”

Didn’t get us into “any new wars” and protection from terrorism has been “very very solid,” eh?  Maybe Powell missed those several weeks in the spring of last year when the US began bombing another country in an effort to decapitate its regime, and then fall back to support other nations’ efforts to do the same.  That decision to go to war against Moammar Qaddafi — there is no other word for it — created the environment in eastern Libya where terrorist networks operate freely, including al-Qaeda, and have chased all other Western nations and most NGOs out of the area.  The Obama administration was a little too slow to recognize the danger, though, and that’s why four Americans ended up dead in Benghazi in a well-coordinated terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, including the first US Ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years.

I’m not surprised by Powell’s choice, although I’m a little mystified at his reasoning, especially on economic grounds. This is, after all, the worst economic “recovery” since World War II, and it’s getting worse each year rather than better. Powell says he’s still a Republican, but I suspect that he’s rather bitter about what happened in the march to war in Iraq, especially as it relates to him, and still holds a major grudge against Republican leadership.  I’m certainly not going to personally belittle a man who has served this nation almost his entire adult life until his well-deserved retirement over his political preferences in an election.  I just think he’s very, very wrong, and demonstrably so.