TPM on Bush and Pakistan

(September 20, 2006 -- 07:31 PM EDT)

It's hard to know where to begin in trying to disentangle the knot of jingoism, recklessness, bad faith and bamboozlement that is President Bush's latest boast that if he had good intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts he would send US troops into Pakistan to catch him whether the Pakistanis agreed or not.

On Friday he suggested that he wouldn't because "Pakistan is a sovereign nation." And, yes, not invading other countries is a good rule of thumb in most cases, if one this president has tended to honor in the breach. But I think that given the unique history, most presidents and most Americans would be willing to violate another country's sovereignty if they had actionable intelligence that gave a good chance of successfully capturing OBL.