QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 7:31 A.M. ET:  We begin today with a magnificent column by Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal.  You may not be able to access the whole thing unless you're a WSJ subscriber, but can find the complete text by Googling AJAMI PETRAEUS.  The column contains this gem:

Mr. Obama's is an uncertain trumpet. He had vowed to fight in Afghanistan while belittling the challenge that radical Islamism posed to American security. He had told his devotees that the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world was certain to blow over in the aftermath of his election. He had attributed much of that anti-Americanism to the Iraq war and to the ideological zeal of his predecessors. His foreign policy was to explicitly rest on a rupture with the foreign policy of the past. Like Jimmy Carter's in the 1970s, this was to be a foreign policy of contrition for America's presumed sins.

A big battle loomed at home, and this was where Mr. Obama's heart and preferences lay—a struggle between economic freedom and the marketplace on one side and an intrusive, redistributionist state on the other. In this new climate of national introversion, Afghanistan was at best a sideshow. The war was going badly, and Mr. Obama feared that this war would overwhelm his presidency.

COMMENT:  Given the course of this presidency, almost anything seems capable of overwhelming it.  Even a bad hair day might produce policy catastrophe.

Some presidents grow in office.  This president hasn't.  He is a leftist ideologist, a soldier in a left-wing army that believes it has found the one true faith.  That faith bans words like "victory," making it impossible for Barack Obama, if his route continues unchanged, to become a true commander-in-chief.  The question is whether he cares.

June 28,  2010