Appeaser-In-Chief

MUDD: Do know what the penalty for fraud is on Deneb Five?
SPOCK: The guilty party has his choice. Death by electrocution, death by gas, death by phaser, death by hanging...
MUDD (interrupting): The key word in your entire peroration, Mister Spock, was, d-d-death.
-From the Star Trek episode I, Mudd

Osama bin Laden's fate was sealed as soon as his exact whereabouts became known to the U.S. military (thanks in part to intelligence obtained from the waterboarding of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed). Unlike a convicted citizen of Deneb Five, the "choice" of the means of death would not be bin Laden's. The President of the U.S. would decide whether it would be a missile strike or execution by special ops. There is no mainstream politician in America (Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul don't count) who would have spared bin Laden. Yet Obama uses the bin Laden case to fend off criticism that he's an appeaser - "Ask Osama bin Laden...whether I engage in appeasement..."
Actually, it would be more revealing to ask Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il that same question. (It would also be much more likely to receive any response. Recall Obama's comment in a 2008 Memorial Day speech -
"On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today..."
Apparently, not only can Obama see dead people, he wants to talk to them).

Sorry Barack. If there's one word that most closely describes your foreign policy, it's appeasement. And what has it accomplished? In the case of Iran, Charles Krauthammer explains,

For his exertions, Obama earned (a) continued lethal Iranian assistance to guerrillas killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, (b) a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant, (c) the announcement just this week by a member of parliament of Iranian naval exercises to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, (d) undoubted Chinese and Russian access to a captured U.S. drone for the copying and countering of its high-tech secrets.

How did Obama answer that one?

On Monday, he politely asked for the drone back.

On Tuesday, with Putin-like contempt, Iran demanded that Obama apologize instead. “Obama begs Iran to give him back his toy plane,” reveled the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Just a few hours earlier, Secretary Clinton asserted yet again that “we want to see the Iranians engage . . . we are not giving up on it.”

Tough talk indeed.