Late last night I was writing a fairly dyspeptic post on the shamelessness and contradictions of Obama’s mainstream Republican foreign policy critics. This was provoked by some of the early complaints that Obama had postponed his trip to Indonesia and Australia to oversee the final stages of the health care voting. After I finished, I looked it over and decided to delete it. It occurred to me that I must have been overreacting. Surely his mainstream Republican critics would not fixate on the postponed trips as anything meaningful!

Then Daniel Blumenthal chimed in, and it became clear that I should have kept the post much as it was. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it from the trash. Here were the main paragraphs:

It is hardly optimal to delay scheduled foreign visits to secure passage of domestic legislation, but the people who are complaining about this now would have said that Obama was ignoring America’s problems and jaunting off to foreign locales if he had gone as scheduled. Had he gone, and had the health care bill failed in the House, he would be widely mocked on the right as a failed, ineffective President who ran away on the eve of the most important vote of his Presidency to date. Now that he has stayed and apparently succeeded in advancing the centerpiece of his domestic agenda in the face of strong resistance, he will be attacked for disrespecting and ignoring important allies abroad. Having ridiculed him for failing to lead, his opponents will declare that he has led us all astray. Perhaps he has, but would you trust his reflexive, automatic critics to tell you the truth? Having derided him for his inability to set priorities, they will attack him for having made the most important part of his domestic agenda into the top priority for the moment.

Of course, had Obama gone to Indonesia and Australia, we would have heard about the “post-American” President indifferent to the troubles of his countrymen. His opponents would say that he was eagerly looking for a new occasion to criticize the United States. We know we would have heard this because we already heard it when he went to Copenhagen to make an appeal to Chicago’s Olympic bid (“why is he neglecting the people’s business?”), and then when that bid failed (as anyone paying any attention knew it would) he was blamed for the supposed national humiliation this involved. Never mind that these would be many of the same people who insisted during his intense year of foreign policy engagement and foreign travel that he did not care very much about foreign policy and wasn’t interested in it. A few seconds before his critics said that, they claimed that he was preoccupied with traveling abroad and engaging in his so-called “apology tour,” which incidentally never took place. These people are utterly shameless.

Blumenthal’s post is almost the distilled essence of the nonsense I’m describing, complete with whining about the inadequacy of Pentagon funding. That would be the same funding that has been steadily increasing since Obama took office and which was exempted from the announced spending freeze.