Gerald Warner: Barack Obama and the CIA: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?
“If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution.” more……

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Andrew C. McCarthy: Obama’s Interrogation Mess - He made it, and now he’ll have to bear the consequences.
“Obamateur Hour continues.
At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Amie Parnes are reporting that Pres. Barack Obama is now backing away from the idea of an inquiry into the Bush-era enhanced-interrogation tactics — at least insofar as such a probe might be conducted by a 9/11 Commission–style panel or Pat Leahy’s proposed “truth commission.” (The Politico reports are here and here; Jen Rubin, who is closely monitoring developments at Contentions, has observations here.) The president, having started a fire by recklessly releasing memos describing interrogation tactics, and then having poured gasoline on the flames by reversing himself on the banana-republic notion of investigating his political rivals, cannot douse the resulting inferno simply by saying, Oh, never mind.

The president is reeling because he sees his legislative agenda going up in smoke. In his inexperience, he reckoned that his base on the Left would somehow be sated by the mere disclosure of Bush-era methods, coupled with vague assurances that a day of reckoning for Bush administration officials might soon be at hand. His Republican opposition, he further..”more……

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Howard Underwood: The problem with Republicans
“… the numbers show that, as a general matter, Republicans are selling a message that America isn’t buying.  Our task, therefore, is both to re-frame the conservative message without sacrificing our principles and to find a better way to market that clarified message.  One thing is certain:  We cannot out-Democrat the Democrats.  We cannot compete with their vision of the Government as the solution to all of our problems.  We must provide America with our own vision.

The Obama campaign certainly noticed that innate conservativism.  While Obama’s policies periodically, and embarrassingly, leaked out before November 4 (only to burst into full flower after his inauguration), during the campaign itself he actually tried to hide most of those policies.  Instead, he won with the American people using empty slogans: “Hope.”  “Change.”  “Hope and Change.”  “We are the Change.”  Obama successfully abandoned substance and won convincingly with a content-free message.” more……

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Ed Morrissey: Obama to end representation in interrogations?
Wasn’t Obama supposed to be a Constitutional scholar?

“Rolling back Michigan v Jackson would be a mistake.  People who ask for an attorney should get one without further questioning.  Americans have the right to counsel at all stages of the process, not just in court, as Obama argues.  The adversarial process begins with arrest and interrogation, not when people first face a judge.  While Miranda has been turned into a fetish, Michigan actually does the work Miranda promises — to get people counsel when they most need it.  That does serve a real purpose, despite what Obama argues.” more……

-Cnation