For most of my life, it was a standard talking point for nearly all politicians — though especially Republicans — to say that politicians shouldn’t muck around with military decisions. Yes, the president is the commander-in-chief and he sets the mission, but the lesson from Vietnam, we were told, was that the president shouldn’t be selecting bombing targets from maps on the Oval Office desk. For instance, George HW Bush explained that in the first Iraq war he gave Colin Powell and the military brass “the freedom of action to do the job once the political decision had been made. I would avoid micromanaging the military.” This was a priority for Bush because he “did not want to repeat the problems of the Vietnam War (or numerous wars throughout history), where the political leadership meddled with military operations.”

Anyway, doesn’t it seem like all of that has simply disappeared from the national debate? We are still waiting to hear from the president about what he will do to get rid of ISIS. But we haven’t had to wait to find out what he won’t do. For instance, Josh Earnest explained yesterday the president has been “pretty clear…about what he’s not contemplating. The president is not contemplating the deployment of combat boots on the ground into Iraq or Syria to deal with the situation.”

It’s a separate question about whether that is the right policy, my point is that it’s remarkable how unremarkable it is that the president is allowing his political and ideological imperatives to constrain his options from the outset.