A Great Obama Moment, and a Rare Harrogatean 'Tip of the Hat' to Andrew Sullivan

Harrogate's dislike for Andrew Sullivan runs deep, and always has, despite the fact that they agree on a handful of very important issues. All this has been registered on this blog, in the past.

But as the saying goes, a blind groundhog will find an acorn every now and then. Lo about a week ago, Harrogate became immensely indebted to Andrew Sullivan for posting about an awesome Obama moment Harrogate would otherwise have missed.
Here is an excerpt from Obama's speech that Sullivan rightly dubbed "Quote for the Day" on Thursday, June 19th.

Quoth Obama:

I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11.

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice.

They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors – the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we’d be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership – the people who murdered 3000 Americans – have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

One of the most frustrating memes our "liberal media" slavishly replicates is that national security is the strong suit of John McCain. Only if security and perpetual warfare are interchangeable, is this true.

Harrogate is proud of Obama for not ceding ground, for not letting the media dictate that because McCain's vision is the most murderous (the word they would use is "toughest") in the game, it follows that the Arizonan stands to make American safer. Yea, when Obama chooses to, he can hit real, real hard with the Rhetoric.