And They Say He Is No Ass-Kicker

Joe Klein, in an elegant riposte to Dorothy Rabinowitz's strangely empty attack on the Americanness of Barack Obama, reminds us of something:

We are waging savage war--nightly attacks, I am told--on the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan (a process that might yield some success on the ground if the Karzai government weren't so titanically dreadful and corrupt). Afghanistan has been called Obama's war; it certainly wasn't George W. Bush's, who left the job unfinished to fight a war of choice in Iraq. We are also mounting regular Predator attacks that are decimating the leadership of Al Qaeda on the Af/Pak border, and chasing down--and killing--Al Qaeda operators in Somalia and Yemen. This effort has been made more effective by the enhanced human intelligence capabilities ordered by George W. Bush, but it has taken place on Obama's watch, at his behest.