QUOTE OF THE DAY - AT 9:27 A.M. ET:  From Michael Barone, commenting on the Obama administration's reaction to Fort Hood:

Islamist terrorists despise our tolerance and freedom and work to inflict as much damage as they can on Western society.

But Barack Obama and his administration, eager to placate our enemies and ever ready to disrespect our friends, tend to downplay this threat. The president has been mulling his course on Afghanistan and declaring his slavish respect for the mullah regime in Iran.

In response to Major Nidal Hassan's mass murders at Fort Hood, Obama and top officials -- General George Casey and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano -- seem less worried about whether military and civilian officials ignored clear signs that this man was an Islamist terrorist and more worried about whether ordinary Americans might indiscriminately stage mass attacks on Muslims.

This carries our virtue of tolerance to a ridiculous extreme and makes our system of laws, in Justice Robert Jackson's words, “a suicide pact.” If our enemies today seem less formidable than our enemies before 1989, they are nonetheless dangerous. If the process of distinguishing Islamist terrorists from ordinary Muslims is difficult, so was the process of distinguishing Communists from social democrats.

Our earlier leaders had faith in the ability of ordinary Americans to make such distinctions and to behave tolerantly even while aggressively fighting evildoers. And they had confidence, even in that Short Twentieth Century, of the basic goodness of our system. Does Obama have that faith and that confidence?

COMMENT:  The answer, I think, is that Obama and his crowd have little faith in the American people because the American people scare them.  They're frightened of any American who does not share their special background, or have equivalent College Board scores.  That fear, of course, does not extend to foreign peoples, who enjoy special status because of their exotic "cultures."

Barone nails it.

November 11, 2009