Maybe, as a former member of the Bush administration, I’m just too sensitive. But as a concerned citizen who desperately wants to give the administration the benefit of the doubt whenever I can for trying to do the right thing to defend and advance America’s vital interests around the world, they do occasionally make it very, very hard. Today’s example comes from an Associated Press report of Secretary of State Clinton’s trip to Pakistan where she met with a group of students:

As a way of repudiating past U.S. policies toward Pakistan, Clinton told the students “there is a huge difference” between the Obama administration’s approach and that of former President George W. Bush. “I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him,” she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. “So to me, it’s like daylight and dark.”

Does anyone advising President Obama and the secretary of state really believe that this kind of partisanship and trash-talking abroad about another American president is really going to buy us much long-term goodwill among either our friends or our adversaries? Do they imagine that this sort of thing really helps to advance U.S. national interests?       

— John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.