QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  From John Lehman, secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, and a member of the 9-11 Commission, on Obama's anti-terror policy.  From NRO:

"President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”

COMMENT:  Exactly right.  Members of the government take their cue from the president.  For a year that cue has been that terrorism is a law-enforcement problem, that it's been exaggerated, and that part of it is our fault.  Great for the morale, huh?   And, of course, one of the first steps Attorney General Eric Holder took upon assuming office was to launch an inquiry into the actions of CIA agents during the Bush administration – no doubt a superb recruiting tool for the agency.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a stalwart American ally who hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for standing with us in tough times, said this about terror today:  "Personally I think we will defeat this terrorism when we understand it is one battle, one struggle. This is a global movement with an ideology."

Again, exactly right.  The president, even yesterday, dragged in the old leftist chestnuts about "poverty" and all kinds of social ills as causes of terrorism, forgetting that many of the most prominent terrorists come from middle-class or wealthy families, and that some have even been physicians.

Terror originates, not with social conditions, but with ideas.  And those ideas extend well beyond Al Qaeda, which is just one group.  The president yesterday finally said that we were at war with that group, but mentioned no one else.  That must have brought great relief to the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, and all the other worthies that Mr. Obama and his Ivy League cohorts apparently haven't noticed.

January 8, 2010