(Wikipedia)

(Wikipedia)

Invoking Sarah Palin, DFL gubernatorial hopeful Mark Dayton took a shot at Gov. Tim Pawlenty Monday, only to have the guv return fire. But his response has earned Pawlenty another comparison to Palin.

Dayton, the former U.S. senator, said Pawlenty should reimburse taxpayers for his weekend trip to Germany.

“If he wants to go away on a weekend to try to make himself look better-qualified for president than Sarah Palin, he has a right to do so,” Dayton said. “But he ought to pay for it out of his own campaign committee and not pretend this has anything to do with his official responsibilities.”

Later in the day, Pawlenty told WCCO that the trip — so Pawlenty could attend the Munich Conference on Security Policy — “didn’t cost the taxpayers anything out of pocket, in the sense that there’s a military plane that went to Germany that carried the delegation.” He went on:

“[W]hen you’re the commander in chief of the Minnesota National Guard, and you’re going to deploy soldiers — like we are tomorrow night at the St. Paul civic center, a thousand soldiers going off to Iran (Editor’s Note: Pawlenty said Iran on the air. His spokesman said he misspoke and corrected himself on the air later) and a month from now another thousand going to the Middle East to fight in the war — it helps to have an understanding of those issues, the dynamics, the security issues.”

Of that, TMP’s Eric Kleefeld quipped, “Pawlenty apparently has a Palin-style belief that a governor’s official role as head of the state National Guard has some importance in foreign policy. And while explaining this concept, he managed to get wrong which country his state’s troops are actually being sent to.”

Update: Former MnIndy editor Steve Perry makes a similar observation over at Politics in Minnesota.