The difference being, of course, that the GOP has always been tougher on terror, so their criticisms on this issue are not as easy to characterize as politically motivated.

Check out Shelby Steele’s piece on Obama, if you have a chance. He sounds like he’s saying the same thing as you are:

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

* * * * *

[Obama] has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one’s true beliefs without this. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.

Yes he does. President Obama seems to be deliberately trying to change his image to correspond to Americans’ unhappiness with his performance. This actually has me more worried! I have not been impressed by the intelligence of whomever is driving the train (Emmanuel? Axelrod?) and I don’t trust their ability to gauge what it is about the President’s first year in office that has so many of us upset and frustrated. It seems like they are fixating on projecting strength; the news reports about the President bowing to foreign leaders, not using words like “terrorist,” etc. Well, that’s part of the problem, and the Nobel prize speech and his discourse regarding the Christmas Day terrorist attack on the Delta flight in Detroit are more muscular than we are used to hearing from his administration. However, I have even less respect for a leader who is so quickly willing to change his stance on such fundamental concepts simply due to the numbers from some polls.

Let’s hope the President is truly learning from his errors, and the change we see is sincere, and comes from him growing. Knowing Emmanuel and Axelrod I doubt that’s the case. I think it’s just more packaging. If it is our enemies will see through that. I hope I am wrong.

(See? I’ll give it to both sides.)

I don’t know if we can stop everything that might happen based on what we know. It does seem as if this guy should/could have been stopped at many points, but stuff slips between cracks all the time, no matter who is in charge.

Yes we need to try and do our best to make sure the cracks are really small, but there’s always going to be cracks.

While I am annoyed every. single. time. they do something that they blasted Bush for, I want to be careful how I retaliate. Not saying you are doing that here, Mike, just in general.