Obama’s ‘It ain’t me’ moment. Says it wasn’t his decision to withdraw troops.

President Obama, who ran for election in 2008 and 2012 on the issue of pulling our troops out of  Iraq, now claims it’s all Iraq’s fault there are no troops there to fight off Islamic State. Addressing reporters over the weekend, the president rhetorically held his hands up and said, ‘hey, not me, guys.’

“This issue keeps on coming up as if this was my decision. The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq.”

Thinker, author and film maker, Dinesh D’Souza, put this meme mocking Obama on both his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The absurd declaration must have caused more than a few cases of whiplash in the presidential press corps. Maybe they thought they’d dreamt the entire troop pull out and election. More likely they remembered from June this New York Times story whose lead read:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said on Monday that it has accepted from the Iraqi government the same sort of immunity agreement for newly dispatched Special Operations troops that it refused to accept in 2011, when it opted to withdraw all American troops from Iraq rather than keep a residual force behind.

Perhaps they remembered, as did Rush Limbaugh, this exchange from Obama’s debate with Mitt Romney in Boca Raton, Florida in October of 2012:

ROMNEY:  You and I agreed, I believe, that there should have been a Status of Forces Agreement.

OBAMA:  That’s not true!

ROMNEY:  Oh, you didn’t?  You didn’t want a Status of Forces Agreement?

OBAMA:  No.  What I — what I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down! 

Even NBC/MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell wasn’t having Obama’s duplicitous tack on Iraq, calling it “a farce,”