Ben Armbruster is puzzled by Ohio Republican Senate nominee Josh Mandel’s dated foreign policy talking points:

But it’s completely unclear where Mandel got this idea that Obama has been treating England, Honduras, or Colombia “like garbage.” He seems to have just randomly picked these countries out of thin air.

Mandel is relying on silly criticisms that became the standard party-line early in 2009. The standard complaints are that Obama “snubbed” Britain because of the supposedly insulting return of Churchill’s bust, he supposedly “sided with Chavez” in Honduras by aligning the U.S. with the OAS’ condemnation of Mel Zelaya’s removal from office (and from Honduras) by the Honduran military, and he wasn’t doing enough to support the relationship with Colombia because the administration was negotiating the addition of a few more provisions about labor protections into the still-flawed Colombian FTA.

None of these criticisms was very compelling at the time. I thought the administration was mistaken in its response to the provisional Honduran government, but it never amounted to siding with Chavez or anything of the sort. Since then, the administration has been only too willing to break with the OAS position on Honduras by recognizing Lobo’s election victory and reconciling with the new Honduran government. That has led to some new criticisms from the left accusing Obama of facilitating Zelaya’s overthrow and blaming Obama for everything that has gone wrong in Honduras during the last two years. A much better criticism of U.S. policy in Honduras would point to the destructive effects the drug war is having on Honduran society.

As for the supposed mistreatment of Britain and Colombia, these criticisms are even weaker. The one thing that the British could legitimately gripe about is the unnecessary insertion of the U.S. into the Falklands issue, but that seems to have been corrected at this point. The Colombian FTA is a bad agreement for Colombians and doesn’t do much for the U.S., either, but the critics of Obama’s handling of the agreement have been upset that it was not completed sooner. Mandel didn’t pick these examples out of thin air exactly, but a brief review of the so-called substance of these complaints is a reminder of just how shallow most Republican foreign policy criticisms have been over the last three years.