Obama now touts weapon he opposed

IBD:
As Pyongyang threatens a nuclear strike, the administration says our missile defenses can handle anything they can throw against us or our allies. If so it's not because of anything the president did.

'I can tell you that the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Thursday after North Korea's raging runt, Kim Jong-un, said Pyongyang was scrapping the 1953 armistice deal that ended the Korean War. He threatened a "preemptive" nuclear strike against the U.S.

Carney added that "our recent success in returning to testing of the upgraded version of the so-called GBI (ground based interceptor), or the CE2 missile, will keep us on a good trajectory to improve our defense capability against limited ballistic missile threats such as those from North Korea. But let's be clear, we are fully capable of dealing with that threat."

The operative word here is "returning," for what Carney did not say is that candidate Obama campaigned on gutting missile defense and carried out that pledge in his first term, along the way betraying our allies and caving in to Russian demands that we limit our missile defense capabilities.

In a campaign video shown to the far left group, Caucus for Priorities, a month before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses, candidate Obama pledged, "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space." And he kept his word.

President Obama's 2010 defense budget cut $1.4 billion from the Missile Defense Agency's budget. The cuts included scaling back the Airborne Laser boost-phase program, terminating the Multiple Kill Vehicle and Kinetic Energy Interceptor, canceling the expansion of those same ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, and delaying funding for interceptor and radar sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

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We also need to develop lift stage missile defense to hit the rocket as it is launched before it can deploy weapons and decoys.  The lift stage missle defense could be launched from ships or from South Korea or Japan.

Obama's opposition to missile defense as well as that of other Democrats should be an issue he is questioned on, but I don't believe anyone raised the point when Carney was making his statement about our defensive missiles.

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