GOP Continues to Blow Off Rule About Not Criticizing the President During Wartime

Criticizing the president during wartime is fine, as long as it's based on reality and facts. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, isn't fine. You either support the president, any president, in wartime or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
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The biggest news of the past 10 days: President Obama launched the first sorties into Syria, targeting ISIS terrorists. Within 24 hours, however, Republicans everywhere decided to turn an awkward salute into a near-impeachable crime against humanity, thus violating one of their most sacred rules from the Bush administration era: never criticize the commander-in-chief during wartime. Here's just another friendly reminder of what I thought was the rule about this kind of behavior (note that O'Reilly and Hannity have been especially critical of Obama):

"You don't criticize the commander-in-chief in the middle of a firefight. That could be construed as putting U.S. forces in jeopardy and undermining morale."

--Bill O'Reilly, April, 2004

"I've held this in long enough. I really suspect that these liberal tactics are damaging, maybe even killing the morale of our troops."

--Rush Limbaugh, 6/14/07

"The only ideas that they espouse are ways to undermine the troops in harm's way and undermine their commander in chief while they're at war. Your candidates have no idea how to keep this economy strong."

--Sean Hannity, 10/18/06

"He's the commander-in-chief. And what I find frankly repugnant about you and some of your fellow Democrats -- you have undermined our president..."

--Sean Hannity, 03/19/06

"You know, Norman, those comments while we are at war, while troops are in harm's way, while he is the commander in chief, do you not see the outrage in that?"

--Sean Hannity, 11/12/07

"I have had it with members of your party undermining our troops, undermining a commander in chief while we are at war..."

--Sean Hannity, 11/05

"Can we do it without distorting their legacies and pandering to anti-American elites worldwide and using their deaths to embarrass and undermine our commander in chief?"

--Michelle Malkin, 11/23/05

"On the other hand, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Congress are successful in undermining the commander-in-chief (thereby emboldening the terrorists to kill more Americans in Iraq)..."

--Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, 04/11/07

"And furthermore, one of the fundamental principles we have in America is that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and attempts to undermine the commander in chief during time of war amounts to treason."

--Pat Robertson, 12/07/05

"While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief."

--Zell Miller, Republican National Convention, 9/01/04

"Through their relentless, vicious attacks on Bush, they systematically undermined the public's confidence in the war and our ability to optimally wage it."

--Conservative Columnist David Limbaugh

For the record, I'm being ironical. Criticizing the president during wartime is fine, as long as it's based on reality and facts. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, isn't fine. You either support the president, any president, in wartime or you don't. You can't have it both ways. Come to think of it, never mind. Fox News and the others clearly can have it both ways.

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