Whine all you want, Mitt. Bin Laden's still dead.

In one of the most audacious displays of political hypocrisy I can ever recall (and, people, that is one very high bar), Ed Gillespie, a former adviser to Junior Bush and current adviser to the Romney-for-President campaign, whined on Meet the Press that President Obama is using the death of Osama bin Laden as a political weapon.  Indeed, Gillespie claims that the President has "managed to turn [bin Laden's death] into a divisive partisan political attack."

This desperate, nonsensical plaint is but half of the Republican effort to diminish the accomplishment of bin Laden's death.  The other half of the "argument" is that, given the same set of circumstances, any president would have done just as did President Obama.  "Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order," Romney pooh-poohed in answer to a shouted question on the campaign trail.

Get it?  No big deal.  Obama got handed a golden ticket.  But Romney himself is on record saying "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."  And remember how, in the 2008 presidential campaign, Romney attacked candidate Obama for suggesting that Obama would order a military strike within Pakistan if there were actionable intelligence on bin Laden.

As I said:  jaw-dropping, bald-faced hypocrisy on the part of Romney and his minions.  But it doesn't seem likely to work.  Even the notoriously forgetful American voter can recall that, a mere nine years ago, two months after the illegal invasion of Iraq, it was Junior Bush who played dress up and arranged a jet fighter landing on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California so he could deliver a boastful (and utterly inaccurate) speech before a red, white, and blue banner reading "Mission Accomplished."

God knows who the Romney campaign hopes to win over with this kind of inane, fabricated nuance.  Anyone who might swallow it is someone who would never vote for Obama anyway.  Those people will buy anything that validates their ignorance and confirms their hatred.

Romney is in a tough place.  President Obama rendered all the bantam-cock strutting by Junior Bush, and by extension, all Republicans, as the fantasy musings of small-minded posers, of narrow-shouldered huff-and-puffers.

Tough break, that.