Ahmed Ghailani, the al-Qaeda terrorist who participated in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, will be sentenced this month, perhaps to life imprisonment, but perhaps to as little as 20 years.

Ghailani was transported from Guantanamo Bay to New York City to await trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in June 2009. When the case came to trial, the judge disallowed the testimony of a key witness. On November 17, 2010, a jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy, but acquitted him of 284 other charges including all murder counts. Critics of the Obama administration said the verdict proves civilian courts cannot be trusted to prosecute terrorists because it shows a jury might acquit such a defendant entirely. Supporters of the trial have said that the conviction and the stiff sentencing prove that the federal justice system works.

Not if he gets only 20 years.

Last month the House banned funding to bring Guantanamo prisoners to the US to be tried as criminals in federal courts.

Predictably, this elicited howls of protest from those who hold the strange opinion that prisoners of war should be tried individually like civilian citizens; the pro-Islam sentimentalists (such as President Obama and Attorney-General Eric Holder) who want “Gitmo” closed, pretending that it’s a tough penal institution rather than the holiday-camp safety-pen it actually is.

Prisoners of war should be kept until the war is over. If trials must be held, they should be conducted by military tribunals, and death sentences should be carried out promptly with guns.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the planner of 9/11, Richard Reid the shoe-bomber, Nidal Malik Hasan the Fort Hood mass-murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear-bomber, Faisal Shahzad the Times Square car-bomber, and all Muslim terrorists waging jihad against the non-Muslim world should be brought before military tribunals.

This is not what is happening. But if jihadists apprehended on American soil are to be tried as criminals, their sentences should be as harsh as the law allows.

Richard Reid was tried as a criminal and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Judge William Young made a most eloquent case for trying terrorists individually as criminals. He declared in his ruling, delivered January 30, 2003:

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist … And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. ..

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom’s sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.

We are about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden, pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

We agree that Reid was not a soldier, and that he is a terrorist. But he tried to blow up a civil aircraft in flight as a Muslim carrying out his duty to wage Holy War, the war that America went to fight in Afghanistan.

On that point we disagree with Judge William Young. But some words of his we think are worth recalling in opposition to those whose hearts bleed for the inmates of Guantanamo :

It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

And long may they do so, however hard the Obama administration tries to bring them under government control.

But such winds should not fan the cheeks of Islam’s Holy Warriors.

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

One of our readers, Frank, points out in a comment on our end-of-year post, A picture for history, that flying terrorists could easily disguise themselves as nuns to avoid (actually non-existent) profiling, and he reminds us of the “Jihad Janes” – two American women who tried (though not in nuns’ habits) to join the Islamic jihad, but were arrested before they could carry out their planned acts of violence.

We re-read the story as told by the Sunday Times on March 14, last year.

Colleen LaRose, a divorced woman of 46, living in Pennsburg, PA, who called herself “Jihad Jane”, flew to Europe with the intention of killing a Swedish man she had never met and who had done her no harm whatsoever.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, also a divorced woman, aged 31, living in Leadville, CO, chose to play a part in the same plan. Off she flew to help murder the hapless Swede.

LaRose’s only reported motive was to alleviate her own boredom. She “used her  Twitter social networking account to raise funds for Pakistani militants”, and after her arrest, a message was found on her laptop  announcing, “I’m so bored, I want to scream.”

Paulin-Ramirez was in a similar desperate pickle:

“She never liked who she was,” Christine Holcomb-Mott, her mother, told The Wall Street Journal. “She was always looking for something.”

So she converted to Islam for novelty and excitement, which was greatly enhanced by the opening it gave her to join the jihad. She “communicated [on the internet] with Islamic radicals around the globe.”

[She] changed her Facebook photograph to one depicting her in a hijab with only her eyes showing and told her astounded family she had converted to Islam. …

She began posting messages on Facebook forums with headings such as “Stop calling Muslims terrorists!” and communicating with Islamic radicals around the globe.

The stranger targeted by the two bored women was Lars Vilks, the cartoonist made famous by furious global Muslim protest against his drawings of a dog with “the head of Muhammad”, published in a Swedish newspaper in 2007.

When LaRose reached Europe, she “declared online: ‘Only death will stop me now I am so close to the target.’” But a month later she flew back home, mission unaccomplished, and was arrested on landing and charged with terrorism. Her testimony led to the arrest of Paulin-Ramirez.

There is nothing new, so there should be nothing surprising, about self-indulgent bored women seeking distraction, excitement, and a sense of exceptional virtue and importance in dedicating themselves to someone else’s cause. (See our post, When innocence is vice, September 23, 2010.) Still there is something strikingly low about this pair: their blithe insouciance, their thick-headed ignorance. They’re as silly as they’re vicious.

On the eve of the new year, this is our Picture of the Year 2010.

At a US airport, a Muslim searches a nun for hidden weapons.

Nuns have been attempting to blow up planes.

One tried to light explosive material in her shoe, another in her underwear, while flying to America from Europe.

A nun put a bomb into a plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Nuns started hijacking aircraft and holding crews and passengers hostage in the late 1970s.

Never forget that 19 nuns hijacked four planes on 9/11, flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon, and crashed another, killing some 3,000 people, in the name of their Holy Trinity.

And those are only a few examples of a long list of their violent attacks, carried out or planned, in recent years.

Christians in general are waging a holy war against the rest of the world, using the method of terrorism.

Muslims are doing everything they can to defend their fellow human beings from this relentless onslaught.

“Let us arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” – as Churchill said (more or less) when Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for a worthless promise of peace.

Now it is the freedom of the internet that is under threat, not only by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but – even worse – by Islam.

Pamela Geller – she who alerted America to the Ground Zero mosque plan – writes at the American Thinker:

Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new “Arab States” region will have five seats as well. …

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009 … ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government. …

The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. …

The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role — something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush. …

The OIC is the main engine of the stealth jihad against the West. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 for its role in the quiet conquest of Europe by Islam, now well under way. (And see also The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, which is about the appointment by President Obama of a Muslim terrorist sympathizer as a US representative to that nefarious organization.)

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn’t… Anti-jihad sites like … AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site … will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else. …

The new “net neutrality” rules approved last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will just make that easier as well… [by taking] the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and [concentrating] it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. …

James G. Lakely, the co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank … charged that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, an Obama crony, wants to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”  … [in]  an attempt to limit the freedom of internet users by subjecting what [has] always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation. In short, the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

An internet censored by Muslim ideologues and controlled by the feds. Do you see your freedom of speech slipping away?

We see all our freedom slipping away. Obama is not even selling but gifting America to Islam.

For a long time now it has been pretty darn obvious that the waging of war – or rather the waging of social work under the misnomer of war – in Afghanistan is pointless. Now it is blindingly clear that it is stupid.

How dare a government ask its bravest citizens to risk their lives in a stupid cause?

Diana West calls the war “sanity-defying”. Which is close to saying it is insane – even worse than stupid.

In an article mostly concerned with the unfair treatment of a US soldier killed by a jihadist, she tells us this:

The U.N. believes about 1 million Afghans between the ages of 15 and 64 – roughly 8 percent of the population — are addicted to drugs. The publication Development Asia estimates 2 million Afghan addicts.

Depending on whose figures you read next, some staggering number of these same addicts ends up in the Afghan National Police (ANP). Fully “half of the latest batch” of police recruits tested positive for narcotics, the Independent reported in March, drawing on Foreign Office Papers from late 2009. Also in March 2010, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported, depending on the province, 12 to 41 percent of Afghan police recruits tested positive. The GAO added: “A State official noted that this percentage likely understates the number of opium users because opiates leave the system quickly; many recruits who tested negative for drugs have shown opium withdrawal symptoms later in their training.” The problem was dire enough, the report continues, to place under consideration “the establishment of dedicated rehabilitation clinics at the regional police training centers.”

Pederasty, misogyny and corruption aside: This drug-addled ANP is part of the Afghan National Security Forces that the U.S. government fully expects — no, completely relies on — to secure Afghanistan against “extremist networks” and is spending $350 million per day in Afghanistan until that happens.

My question: Who’s high here? Illiterate Afghans on drugs, or educated Americans on fantasy?

Like a legion of buttoned-down and uniformed Don Quixotes seeking the impossible COIN (counterinsurgency theory) — winning Afghan hearts and minds from Islamic loyalties, constructing a heretofore unseen Afghan “city on a hill,” training Afghan police (literacy rate 4.5 percent) while simultaneously weaning them from addiction, and don’t get me started on “ally” Pakistan — the United States has plunged into a depth of denial only an extravagant “intervention” could reverse.

It has to stop.

Pity General Petraeus struggling to achieve the impossible, and let him off the slow spit.

Let the Afghans pursue their drug-addled, illiterate, savage way of life. What does it matter to the rest of the world? Only be ready, if they hit America or any American interest ever again to hit them back with the worst America’s got. Real war. All-out for victory. Fast and devastating.

Of course such an attack by American forces can never happen under Obama. But that pusillanimous figure will, fortunately, not be commander-in-chief forever.

“Three months after 9/11, every major Taliban city in Afghanistan had fallen – first Mazar-i-Sharif, then Kabul, finally Kandahar. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were on the run. It looked as if the war was over, and the Americans and their Afghan allies had won,”  ABC news reminded America on May 31, 2010. The war was then in its 104th month, and had become America’s longest, if the Cold War isn’t counted. (Vietnam, the next longest, lasted 103 months.)

ABC did not add that that was when America should have got out; which it should have, with a warning that if any American or American interest were attacked again by terrorists based in Afghanistan, all hell would be loosed on it – a threat that should of course have been carried out if the warning had not been heeded.

The war is now in its 110th month. It’s been dragging on for more than 9 years.

Yesterday, December 14, 2010, the New York Times reported, under the headline Intelligence Reports Offer Dim Views of Afghan War:

The findings in the reports [one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan], called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

They were described to the NYT “by a number of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries”.

The military objects to the findings.

Pentagon and military officials …  say the reports were written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war. …

The dispute “reflects the longstanding cultural differences between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote ‘can do’ optimism”, and it also “reflects how much the debate in Washington over the war is now centered on whether the United States can succeed in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan”.

After years and billions spent trying to win the support of the Pakistanis, [military commanders] are now proceeding on the assumption that there will be limited help from them. The American commanders and officials readily describe the havens for [Taliban] insurgents in Pakistan as a major impediment to military operations. … American officials say Pakistan supports the insurgents as a proxy force in Afghanistan, preparing for the day the Americans leave.

But the US continues to send Pakistan about $2 billion in military and civilian aid each year.

“You’re not going to get to the point where the Taliban are gone and the border is perfectly controlled,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Smith … predicted that Democrats in Congress would resist continuing to spend $100 billion annually on Afghanistan.

“We’re not going to be hanging out over there fighting these guys like we’re fighting them now for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said.

Fifteen years? Ten? Five? One? Why even one more day?

RedState reports on a fight over an important issue in New Jersey:

The fight erupted in May when [Governor Chris] Christie exercised his … prerogative to not re-appoint the liberal John E. Wallace to the New Jersey State Supreme Court.

As we have seen all too often at both the State and Federal level, liberals view the judiciary as a useful tool to undo anything they don’t like which is done by the legislature or, in this case, the governor. Therefore, Christie’s (absolutely legal) attempts to change the composition of the court were seen as a direct threat to their most sacred institution. Accordingly, the New Jersey Senate, led by Democrat Stephen Sweeney, refused to allow a vote to confirm Anne Patterson, Christie’s nominee to replace Wallace. Thus far everything that had occurred in this fight could be chalked up to political posturing.

However, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner then took a step which raised the specter of possible coordination between Rabner and Sweeney by unconstitutionally elevating Edwin Stern, a Court of Appeals judge to the New Jersey Supreme Court (thus bypassing Christie’s right to nominate the next appointee, and the Senate’s vote on confirmation of that nominee), despite the fact that the New Jersey Supreme Court had a five-member quorum even in Wallace’s absence. This naked power grab was so appalling that McGreevey appointee Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto stunned observers on Friday by noting, at the end of a published opinion, that he would be abstaining from all decisions as long as Stern remained on the Court. …

In typically Orwellian fashion, the New Jersey Democrats have accused Christie throughout the process of playing politics with the Court. Justice Rivera-Soto has exposed very plainly that it is really Sweeney (working hand in hand with Rabner) and the rest of the New Jersey Democrats who are playing politics with Justice.

We’d like to see Governor Christie as a candidate for the presidency.

This video shows why, and so does this one.

If he wins this battle, he might convince a lot of voters nation-wide that he’s made of the right stuff for the supreme office.

Obama finds the job of being president too hard, hands over to Bill Clinton, and bolts home to Mother Michelle.

From a first-hand account:

Here’s what I saw. I saw a current president who has never looked less interested in doing his job. I also saw a former president who never lost interest in doing that job. Obama’s demeanor and body language suggested that he’d rather be anywhere but where he was, and then he followed through and actually bolted for the door. Clinton’s demeanor was that of a passionate wonk trying to sell a policy he actually cared about, that he thought would be good for the country. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t even his own policy that he was selling.

I saw a president who … ceded his job to his predecessor. …

It was far and away the weirdest presidential press briefing I’ve ever seen. Where Obama goes from here is anyone’s guess.

Update: Real Clear Politics has a video of the spectacle. Obama actually interrupts Clinton delivering an answer, to say his bit about keeping the first lady waiting, before hitting the exit. Clinton says, “I don’t want to make her mad, just go” and waves POTUS on his way …

Most commentators on this incident have interpreted it as a tacit admission by Obama that he cannot defend the tax agreement he reached with congressional Republicans.

It is that, but we wonder if it isn’t also the most vivid sign yet that Obama cannot cope emotionally or intellectually with the job he was elected to do as president.

Is he in the early stages of mental derangement?

In our post immediately below, The cables show…, we said we were waiting to hear of a single person who has been harmed by the WikiLeaks cables.

Our wait is over.

Ken Blackwell reports in his Townhall column that Hillary Clinton had a very bad week as a direct result of the documents leak.

Even the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza noticed. He designated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as having “the worst week in Washington”, a week ago. This is something of a comedown among liberals, who have been fawning over Hillary. …

He notes the damage done to Hillary’s image by the WikiLeaks revelations. Those leaked cables—those undiplomatic diplomatic documents—show what he calls “a chatty and at times petty State Department offering strikingly candid assessments of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various world leaders.”

That is putting it most diplomatically. These leaks are devastating.

As former Speaker Newt Gingrich says, they show an administration wholly incapable of protecting classified documents. Why, Newt asks, does a low-level Army private have access to a quarter million classified documents? Who gave this grunt a security clearance? Former UN Ambassador John Bolton chimes in: This WikiLeaks scandal shows an administration so weak, so disorganized, that it does not understand the first thing about national security.

We’re trying to look sad about Hillary’s distress.