July 03, 2010 01:56 AM UTC

And the Vietnam War Was Bill Clinton's Decision

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• by: Colorado Pols

Could someone please explain to us how it is that Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele steele has a job? It’s almost like he’s trying to get fired, after March’s fundraising scandal and numerous questionable quotations since then.

But this, from The Associated Press, might take the cake for its level of pure WHAAAATTT???:

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele says Afghanistan is “a war of Obama’s choosing” and the conflict “is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” [Pols emphasis] comments that drew an immediate rebuke from Democrats and a call from at least one Republican for him to resign.

In remarks captured Thursday on camera and posted online, Steele criticized President Barack Obama and his handling of the nine-year-old war begun by Republican President George W. Bush in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“If he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who’s tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed,” Steele said. “And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.” [Pols emphasis]

Republican officials confirmed Steele made the comments at a Connecticut fundraiser, which was closed to the media. The remarks, at odds with many in the Republican Party, were caught on camera and posted on the Web.

“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Steele said. “This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”…

…Conservative Bill Kristol, writing for The Weekly Standard, said Steele should resign.

“There are, of course, those who think we should pull out of Afghanistan, and they’re certainly entitled to make their case,” wrote Kristol, a consistent supporter of the Afghanistan war. “But one of them shouldn’t be the chairman of the Republican Party.”

These statements by Steele are horrible on several fronts. First, there’s the obviously ridiculous statement that the War in Afghanistan is somehow the brainchild of President Obama. Whether or not you agree with the Afghanistan conflict is irrelevant here, because it’s beyond silly to pretend that this wasn’t already going on for years. Obama wasn’t even a U.S. Senator yet when this conflict began.

But the other problem for Steele is that this quote makes Republicans look like they are advocating against the Afghanistan conflict…which, of course, they are not. You’d be hard-pressed to find just about anybody in America who didn’t agree with going into Afghanistan after 9/11, and Republicans definitely don’t want voters to think they are not supportive of the Afghanistan effort.

And finally, we’ve always thought it was China where you weren’t supposed to engage in a land war, not Afghanistan (that was a joke, before our military pals on Pols get upset).