Making choices

Great post from Andy McCarthy on Obama's abdication (or, to be more polite, delegation) of presidential authority with regards to national security issues.

the main problem with Obama's above-it-all, government-by-speeches approach, is that the job of a president is not to vote present, observe, and provide us with running commentary. He's not the play-by-play announcer of a game between arch rivals. He is the main participant on one of the teams, who actually has to make decisions. If he doesn't affirmatively make them, he makes them by default — meaning, the system's routine processes will carry on.

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Then there's Obama — you know, the guy who actually has decision-making authority. (In the executive branch, all the power is reposed in the president. Everyone else, including the vice president and the attorney general, is just carrying our his policies.) What do we get from our president? We get his already tired routine: Some people say our criminal justice system is not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. Others say you must give every arrested person Miranda rights and treat them just like shoplifters. I reject this false choice between terrorism and shoplifting.

Well, no, big guy, it's not a false choice. But it is a choice, it has to be made, and you have to make it. If you're going to use our criminal justice system because you think, as is, it is capable of safeguarding the country from terrorists, then, as the Attorney General argues, you have to give the terrorists Miranda warnings and be accountable for the fact that you will lose at least five weeks of actionable intel against people who are tying to kill us. If you think the justice system doesn't work for this class of offenders, then you have to try another approach, as VP Cheney urges, and be prepared for the inevitability of caterwauling from the Left (knowing it will be considerably milder than what Cheney had to deal with). But one way or the other, you've got to decide. And if you choose to stay on the golf course while the Attorney General handles it, that is a decision to do it the Attorney General's way. Obama's decision, not Holder's.

Read it all. And McCarthy is someone who knows what he's talking about on this subject, as he was the prosecutor who convicted the blinh sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, after the first World Trade Center attack.