© Jim Watson, AFP via Getty Images President Donald Trump makes a statement on Iran at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach Florida, Jan. 3, 2020.

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I have spent the past 20 or so New Years’ Eves glued to the SyFy channel’s “Twilight Zone” marathon. My wife and I love the writing, the plots and picking out famous actors in their one-off roles for the classic television series.

Maybe I’ll write an episode of my own, complete with a Rod Serling-worthy opening monologue: “The year is 2017. Donald Trump is inaugurated as president of the United States, and mass amnesia has washed over America. Half the country can no longer remember anything that happened before Jan. 20. The former president, Barack Obama, is literally sitting right there. Yet, his own party cannot remember one thing about his eight years …”

Obama memory hole

It is one of the strangest phenomena of the Trump era — the memory-holing of Obama’s executive powers. Democrats continuously act as though they’ve just fallen off the Washington turnip wagon when Trump does anything.

Trump’s illegal immigration policies are draconian! He’s deporting too many, they screamed, forgetting that … Obama deported more. A lot more. And, you know those cages on the southern border? Obama built them, not Trump.

Trump’s defying congressional subpoenas! No president has ever stonewalled Congress, they screamed, forgetting that Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, was held in contempt of Congress for … defying subpoenas related to the "Fast and Furious" gun operation scandal. There were at least eight other times when Obama’s administration defied congressional oversight, even preventing people from testifying (sound familiar?).

When Trump announced his “America First” policy during his inaugural, Democrats apparently took it as literally as one can.

Now, they howl over Trump’s latest outrage: The airstrike that killed Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, the general who was in Iraq fomenting attacks against the U.S. Embassy and, evidently, plotting future hits on American targets.

Washington Democrats whined about Trump authorizing a drone strike without their notification or consent. This, after Obama authorized at least 2,800 drone strikes in Iraq and Syria without congressional approval.

Obama's drone strikes

“When Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, he had authorized more drone strikes than George W. Bush had approved during his entire presidency. By his third year in office, Obama had approved the killings of twice as many suspected terrorists as had ever been imprisoned (at) Guantanamo Bay,” Newsweek reported.

Obama practically invented modern push-button warfare, for goodness’ sake! Eventually, the American people will have to choose between partisan disingenuousness or rank stupidity to explain Democratic reaction to Trump’s perfectly precedented decisions.

On Iran, Trump made a bold choice and sent a strong message that we aren’t going to take the regime’s provocations and hostility anymore. Obama sent them pallets of cash. Trump sent an MQ-9 Reaper.

Anyone who knows how this will all shake out is lying. They don’t. But the commander in chief took out the world’s most notorious terrorist, one with plenty of American blood on his hands. Trump is the good guy here, not the terrorist.

Yet, Democrats couldn’t wait to pounce. How many statements included perfunctory “yeah, Soleimani was a bad guy, but … ” construction before hammering Trump?

Here’s a pro tip: If your statement has a “but” in the middle (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren), just eliminate the throat-clearing, political pablum that came before it and say what you really mean. We get it: Iranian Guy Bad, Orange Man Worse.

This attitude will cost Democrats in the upcoming election. Not just on foreign policy, but across the board (they speak of the economy as though we are in another Great Depression). They just can’t give Trump an inch no matter how safe or prosperous the world is, thanks at least in part to the president’s decisions.

It hasn’t always been this way. After the death of Osama bin Laden, Republicans praised Obama’s decision to get him.

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney declared, ‘The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.’ New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said, ‘I admire the courage of the president.’ And Donald J. Trump declared, ‘I want to personally congratulate President Obama,’ ” according to The New York Times.

But no such allowance is given to President Trump when he kills a terrorist. As commentator Guy Benson tweeted, “The U.S. auto industry is alive, and (Abu Bakr) Baghdadi/Soleimani are dead,” referencing the Islamic State leader Trump had killed a few months ago and recalling Obama’s reelection slogan.

Or, as Rod Serling might say, “Democrats will soon wake up from their amnesia to an old lesson: Past is prologue. And it’s a Shakespearean seminar most acutely taken … in The Twilight Zone.”

Scott Jennings is a Republican adviser, CNN political contributor and partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY. This column first appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal.

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Trump was right on Iran. Democrats are suffering from mass amnesia.