Romney ‘disappointed’ in Obama’s use of Bin Laden anniversary

On the anniversary of the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden, Mitt Romney said Tuesday that “any thinking American” would have given the order that President Obama gave to take out the terrorist leader and accused the president of politicizing the event.

“I acknowledge the president’s success. He has every right to take credit for him having ordered the attack. At the same time, I think it’s very disappointing for the president to try to make this a political item by suggesting that I wouldn’t have ordered such a raid,” Romney said on CBS’ “This Morning.” “Of course I would have. Any American, any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing. But of course you give the president the credit for the fact that he did so.”

In recent days, Obama, his campaign and his surrogates have questioned whether Romney would have made the same decision to send in a Navy SEAL team into Pakistan under the cover of night to kill the terrorist leader, based on a statement Romney made in 2007 that “it’s not worth moving heaven and Earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

Romney’s comments were his most direct remarks about the matter, and came hours before he was to visit a firehouse with Rudolph Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that bin Laden masterminded.

Romney was joined by his wife, Ann, who said she is frustrated by the narrative that her husband is “stiff.”

“He’s not, he’s funny,” she said. “…It’s nice for me as a wife to be able to say no, look, this is the person that’s really there, this is the boy that I know, I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was pulling all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy. There’s a wild and crazy man inside just waiting to come out.”

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seema.mehta@latimes.com

Original source: Romney ‘disappointed’ in Obama’s use of bin Laden anniversary