President Obama’s powerful words at today’s National Prayer Breakfast were rightly examined by my dear colleague, Cathy Ruse. How can the same man who wants to force us to pay for the slaughter of innocents seem so convincing? He is surely right to say we must see the face of God in our fellow human beings. We must. Does he?

Abraham Lincoln said it well in 1858. He said the Founders believed that “nothing stamped in the divine image was sent into the world to be trod upon.” Our question to President Obama, with all due respect, is: Are not unborn children so stamped? Can we not see the face of God in their faces?

Lincoln condemned no one in his Second Inaugural, but he said it must seem strange for anyone to ask the help of a just God in wringing his bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Then the President quoted Scripture: Let us not judge lest we be judged. So we must not judge.

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Last year, it was as if we had all been inundated by the great Wave. Barack Obama as candidate said he felt “a righteous wind” at his back. For many of us, though, his support–so broad, so overpowering, so irresistible–was a force of nature.

That great Wave threatened to sweep all before it. The work of decades would be undone. The people had spoken. For many in this democratic republic, the voice of the people is the voice of God. To say no to anything President Obama wanted was to risk being called an obstructionist, a blinkered reactionary, or worse, a racist, a terrorist.

Mr. Obama took the advice of those who specialize in doing things the smart way. If you’re going to do something many of the people might not like, do it fast, do it early, and give them time to forget about it.

It’s the same cynical advice these smart types gave to John Edwards. Wait until an earthquake happens in Haiti, or a revolution occurs in Massachusetts, before you admit paternity, before you stop your relentless lying. And then hope nobody notices. The roar of the Wave might mask whatever you say.

So, President Obama very quickly cast down the Mexico City Doctrine of Ronald Reagan. That policy was duly reaffirmed by both Presidents Bush. Who cares about this stuff, anyway? Wingers? Thumpers? People who are, in the dismissive words of the Washington Post, “poor, uneducated, easy to command?”

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In December, more than 170 countries are meeting in Copenhagen to talk about a world treaty to cut greenhouse gasses.  (A conference, ironically, that’s estimated to create 40,584 tons of carbon emissions—roughly the same amount that the entire country of Morocco generated in 2006).  Liberals are hoping to put the environment on the front burner before Denmark—but that might be difficult considering the political climate in America.

A recent Pew poll found that Americans don’t think global warming is a serious problem.  The number that do fell sharply—from 44% last year to 35% now.  Others are skeptical that climate change was even a problem to begin with!  That percent is bound to double or triple after scientists at the University of East Anglia admitted to “throwing away” raw temperature data to support their claim for global warming.  According to the U.K. Times, “The CRU is the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures.  Climate change skeptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled.  That is now impossible.”  This news, combined with ClimateGate and Americans’ doubts, should be more than enough to put off any international agreements on global warming indefinitely.  President Obama has agreed to make the trip to the conference to lobby for cutting emissions by 17% in 2020.  Given the revelations of disagreement in the scientific community and the growing skepticism in the public, the President should back away from a treaty that will cut U.S. jobs and raise energy costs for families.

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President Obama is said to be taking his time, carefully weighing all alternatives, “calibrating” our response to the situation in Afghanistan with precision and judgment. The point of all these statements is to reinforce the Obama administration’s theme that George W. Bush rushed off pell-mell and did not assess the situation properly before committing U.S. troops.

Not since the famed King Ethelred the Unready have we seen such a long, drawn-out, and public process of decision-making. Despite his name, however, this ancient English king was not called “the unready” because he was unprepared. The word comes from Middle English and means he was ill-advised.

That appellation certainly fits today. We have seen a succession of unconfirmed, unconfirmable czars comes and go. The latest departure has been Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director. She cited Mao Zedong as her favorite political philosopher. If any adviser in any conservative administration had listed some notorious mass murderer as a political model, the roof of the press room would have fallen in.

Now, part of President Obama’s delay must be attributed to the kind of advisers he has chosen and the kind of advice they are giving him. One of these, Bruce Riedel, recently spoke at Tel Aviv University. Riedel is a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institute and a former CIA official.

Riedel is telling the President that we are fighting a losing battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan and that with our forces bogged down there, we are incapable of responding militarily to the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon. “Israelis need to understand that there’s going to be a huge drain on resources, attention and capital [in Afghanistan], and that will have implications,” Reidel said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.

Well. One has to wonder if Bruce Riedel has ever read U.S. history. In World War II, there were many who thought–for less than 24 hours–that we had too much on our hands fighting Japan to enter into a war with Nazi Germany. President Roosevelt responded with speed not just to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but also to Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on the U.S.

To meet those combined threats, the United States had to resort to a draft. We eventually put in uniform one in every 11 Americans. (Today, that figure is less than one in two hundred.) America’s industrial capacity made us the Arsenal of Democracy. During the war, Britain tripled her output, excelling both Germany and Russia, who merely doubled theirs. Japan, incredibly, saw a four-fold increase in production. And America? The United States increased its war production twenty-five times.

Does Bruce Riedel, or any of President Obama’s timorous advisers, have any idea of the capacity for greatness that this country possesses? My diplomatic history prof, Norman A. Graebner, used to tell standing room only lecture halls that the United States was like the great boxer, Joe Louis.

We had power to spare.

If this nation’s life is threatened by murderous mullahs in Tehran, or by Al Qaeda harboring Taliban in Afghanistan, we can do what we have to do. Who else will protect us? The UN?

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So the emails the terrorist Hasan sent to a jihadist imam in Yemen were not deemed threatening? What if they were in code? American cryptographers succeeded in breaking the Japanese naval codes before Pearl Harbor. But they got messages like: “Climb Mount Iitaka.” How were U.S. intelligence officers supposed to know that that was the code name for the attack on the U.S. Naval Base in Hawaii?

Shouldn’t it be our policy that any contact between anyone in the U.S. and any jihadist abroad would be enough to bring the FBI swooping in? We should not care if our “person of interest” is asking the radical about the weather, or mountain climbing.

That’s what we would be doing if this administration were serious about the war on terror, which it is not. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the most liberal President before Barack Obama. But FDR was serious about our nation’s defense. When German-Americans came ashore planning to blow up electric power grids, Roosevelt had them arrested. He didn’t send them to Club Gitmo to read Mein Kampf under the palms. He had the captured saboteurs tried–in secret, by military tribunal–at the Washington Navy Yard. To make sure his Attorney General didn’t spend his time searching for new precedents on the civil liberties of would-be mass murderers, Roosevelt assigned Attorney General Biddle to lead the prosecution. The convicted terrorists were swiftly executed, by electric chair.

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