Interviewing Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory adopted last week's right-wing spin when he asked if Obama's trip to Afghanistan to sign a security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzia and to address U.S. troops on the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden represented a failure for the president.
Gregory even incorporated the New York Post's page-one attack on Obama:
GREGORY: The president went to Afghanistan on the anniversary of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden with a message to America that this war is coming to an end. Headlines around the world, including this in The New York Post, which sort of was a little bit more colorful. “Ka-Bull! Now Obama spikes bin Laden football in Afghanistan,” an allusion to the fact that he would not do that, that there would not be the politicization of killing bin Laden. Was all of this together in effect his “Mission Accomplished” moment?
So David Gregory asked if Obama traveling to Afghanistan to sign a long-term pact on the anniversary of a signature foreign policy and national security success, the killing of bin Laden, was equivalent to Bush's famously premature celebration of what many consider to be his biggest foreign policy and national security failure, the war in Iraq?
Bush's “Mission Accomplished” fiasco became universal shorthand (as well as a punch line) for his administration's botched handling of the war. How is that even remotely similar to the widely heralded raid to kill bin Laden?
And note to Gregory: The fact that the hyper-partisan and bitter New York Post whined (and whined and whined) about Obama marking bin Laden's death and traveling to Afghanistan wasn't surprising. But it's also not news. (The Post hates everything Obama does.) Why Gregory chose to try to legitimize the tabloid'sabsurd, knee-jerk Obama critique, and then try to compare a clear Obama success to an equally clear Bush failure, remains puzzling.