Remember a year ago, when the biggest rationale for Republican supporters of Barack Obama was his “first-class temperament?” Well, as the Obama Administration prepares to enter its second year in the wake of a near-miss terrorist attack, there’s signs that “No Drama Obama” can’t even muster a pulse for his job’s highest responsibility: protecting the American people.
From a story in today’s Politico:
“In general, I think that the president’s inclinations as a leader work fairly well for this issue — no-drama Obama,” [Cato Institute defense and homeland security fellow Benjamin] Friedman said. “In some ways Al Qaeda is trying to be relevant and trying to be politically relevant, and in some sense they achieved that. He’s denying them that relevance by acting like it’s not the No. 1 thing on his agenda. We credit them with more power and credibility than they have.”
Obama heading to the golf course, Friedman said, “signals that it’s not a crisis, and he’s the president and he has a lot of things to do and this is just one of them.”
Friedman and his fellow-travelers on the left and the libertarian right are engaging in a quixotic bit of terrorism-as-child-rearing fantasy. Are we really to believe that the highest maxim of combatting terrorism is “see no evil?” If the targeted Northwest Airlines flight had gone down as planned, would this low-key approach from the President be equally effective in discouraging Al Qaeda? And how has this administration’s orgy of euphemisms (you may remember such hits as “man-caused disasters”) done so far in deterring potential terrorists?
It’s naive to believe there’s no such thing as evil in the world. The only thing more naive may be believing that you can make it go away by ignoring it.
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