While the Democratic debate last night came off as unsurprisingly uneventful, there was at least one question that got some attention today. Moderator Brian Williams had asked:

If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?

Over at National Review, Byron York apparently found Obama’s response too timid in its promise to use military force, while Clinton was more on the money (a view the Clinton camp is apparently advancing as well).

For clarification and context, Obama had said:

Well, first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans…

The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, A, to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there; and B, to find out do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take some action to dismantle that network.

Senator Clinton responded:

I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. If we are attacked and we can determine who was behind that attack, and if there were nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.

I think the main issue with Obama’s response is that he (and Clinton, too, I suppose) answered the question assuming Williams was looking for the immediate presidential response. Obama elaborated and specified (not too light on those details, Barry!) insisting he’d: A) make sure we had an adequate emergency response to the victims, B) make sure there weren’t other potential attacks on the horizon, and then C) set-out to dismantle the terrorist network that planned and executed the attacks. Clinton, on the other hand, simply responded “I’d bomb some motherfuckers.”

But she wouldn’t. There was nearly a month long wait between 9/11 and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and that was back six years ago, when there actually was a country that “supported and gave material aid” to al-Qaeda. Nowadays there really aren’t any motherfuckers left to blow-up—ok, motherfuckers there may be, but no motherfucker-supporting nations with easily defined targets, and you don’t bomb motherfuckers one by one. No bombings were orchestrated after the July 2005 attacks on the London subway system and this is why—there really isn’t anybody left on which to drop some effing bombs, cowboy.

Obama’s response accurately and honestly described what a US president, any US president, be they Republican or Democrat (looking at you, Rudy) would do in the immediate aftermath of that terrible hypothetical; they’d deploy help and assistance to those who were attacked, they’d make sure there weren’t any other impending threats, then they’d go get the dudes who made the attack possible and take them out.

The long-lasting repercussions of a terrorist attack on an administration policy would obviously vary drastically from president to president (and perhaps this is the question Williams was really trying to ask), but the immediate response would almost universally be the same.