Did Obama demonstrate leadership in pulling the trigger on Osama... or did he merely do the only thing he could do?

Here's a former Navy SEAL calling in to Rush Limbaugh's show yesterday:

CALLER: ...I believe that President Obama's hand was forced in this, and this is really just a crass political decision. When I hear people say that this took courage, I just believe he was absolutely forced into doing this.

RUSH: Yeah, because somebody came and said, "We got Osama." So he's got to do something.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: We've got Osama so we've got to do something....

CALLER: If he wouldn't have acted I assure you the information would have been leaked prior to the election cycle.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And he would have had to have dealt with that, and frankly if that came to knowledge late in the election cycle, our next president would be either Hillary Clinton or whoever the Republicans nominated.

Mickey Kaus works a similar theory this morning:

Attention, Republicans: Looking for a theory that will allow you to reconcile Obama’s Abbottabad success with the unfavorable portrait of him that before Sunday was just beginning to come together and burn itself into the collective mediamind–that’ he’s an inexperienced, indecisive leader, constantly debating with himself, who fatally hedges every bet? ... [Consider] the possibility that Obama’s hand was forced by WikiLeaks–i.e., he had to act quickly or else Osama might realize we were on his couriers’ trail and flee...

In other words, Obama’s still a natural ditherer and hedger–it’s just that in this case he was forced into taking decisive action by something bigger: the prospect of a devastating political attack (“He let bin Laden escape”) no candidate entering a reelection campaign could survive. Our young elected leader may not know how to wield global power or reconcile realism and idealism, but he knows a deadly negative sound bite when he sees it. So (maybe after talking it over with his political brain trust) he decided he could not afford not to pull the trigger. Kind of wussy when you think about it!

Kaus denies believing the theory himself, noting that Obama is actually a bit trigger happy: "He’s been shooting drones into Pakistan for years, and recently greenlighted an unnecessary war in Libya." He's been shooting-from-the-sky trigger happy. This shoot-him-in-the-face thing is new, isn't it? It would have been so much easier — and so much more in character — to annihilate the Abbottabad compound from high above.