It’s World Aids Day—a time to unite in the fight against HIV and commemorate those who have died of the disease.

Political parties will vehemently disagree on the precise tactics and funding levels required to address this horrific disease. But in a refreshingly bipartisan event this morning, President Barack Obama made the following comment:

As we go forward, we need to keep refining our strategy so that we’re saving as many lives as possible. We need to listen when the scientific community focuses on prevention.

My good friend Suzanne Taylor just released a film that tells the moving story of the treacherous AIDS epidemic in the African country of Botswana. The Road We Know documents what a small group of college students are doing to encourage prevention.

In Botswana, 1 in 4 people adults has HIV/AIDS. But while the government has done everything the Western world has encouraged—like handing out condoms and offering free testing—the formula has clearly failed.

Desperate for a solution, the government invited a small group of college students to help save their generation with a message of hope and behavior change.

In the film’s trailer, the student leaders share an upbeat message across the country–a message that sex is good and that abstinence isn’t only possible, it’s life-saving. As President George W. Bush remarked in his 2004 State of the Union Address, “Abstinence … is the only certain way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.”

In a 2010 report, UNAIDS could point to a 25 percent drop or more in new infections for young adults ages 15 to 24 in 15 of the most infected nations–primarily due to sexual behavior change. This confirmed that story documented in Botswana was not an isolated trend.

Now that’s a message of hope and change. The kind we should all believe in.

To watch the film or host a screening, visit www.theroadweknow.com.

To connect with Evangelical or Catholic AIDS ministries, check out FRC’s Real Compassion website at www.realcompassion.org.

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The National Mall in Washington is our nation’s showplace.   It’s intended to be that centerpiece that we share with millions of our fellow Americans who flock to the capital each year, as well as with tens of thousands of foreign tourists who are drawn to see this Great Republic.   I had the honor of taking two young New Zealanders on a trek around the Mall earlier this week.   I always enjoy sharing our great monuments with friends new and old. Dr. Sam Bloore and his wife, Julia, were my guests.

I was, frankly, embarrassed by the mess on the Mall.   Not just the trash left over, but the torn-up, boarded-up, barricaded mess that they’ve made of this great public space.

Everywhere there are Jersey walls, chain-link fences, ugly signs, plastic orange cones.

Is it the fault of this administration?   Frankly, yes, it is. I know, I know. People will say that President Obama is hard-pressed. He’s busy driving the unemployment from 9.1% to 9.2%.   He’s got three wars where he’s trying to “lead from behind” [their phrase].   He’s heavily engaged in evolving on marriage.   Apparently, a 41% out-of-wedlock birthrate is not high enough to produce enough low-income voters who will “share the wealth around,” so he’s working hard to repeal welfare reform and make marriage a total irrelevance.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 26, 2011
CONTACT: J.P. Duffy or Darin Miller, (866) FRC-NEWS or (866)-372-6397

Washington, D.C. – Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement in response to President Obama’s second State of the Union Address:

“Tonight President Obama recognized the important role of parents in the educational achievement of their children. President Obama himself has set an example as a father and husband. However, the agenda he has pursued and articulated tonight does not strengthen the kind of family children need: one with a Mom and Dad.

“The intact married family is the core strength of the United States, and public policy should encourage formation of such families. Social science clearly demonstrates that children do best when raised by their own mother and father who are committed to one another in a lifelong marriage, and that adults also thrive when in such a marriage. Sadly, only 45 percent of American children grow up in an intact family.

“Broken homes often result in such social ills as crime, a higher school dropout rate, and drug abuse, themselves leading to enormous costs for state, local and our federal governments. Cutting government spending is imperative, but policies that foster healthy families are even more important – and, interestingly, there is no question that intact families are the most economically productive.

“Unfortunately, many of the Administration’s policies have undermined strong families by affirming sexual behavior that is unhealthy and destructive to individuals, families , the military, and society.

“Tonight President Obama appropriately paid tribute to the victims of the Tucson shooting. However, he did not mention the recent indictment of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia for the murder of a mother and seven live-born infants. The Philadelphia tragedy serves as a ghastly reminder of the moral toll abortion has taken on America’s sense of justice. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), in his official Republican response, deserves praise for reminding the President it is the role of the government ‘to protect innocent life,’ not to encourage the taking of it.

“The President’s policies that promote abortion also undermine family formation. Abortion does this by contributing to infant mortality, victimizing women, and encouraging the abdication of responsibility by men. He is even opposed to commonsense parental notification laws. These laws reaffirm the unique role that a mother and father have in the life of a child.

“Regrettably, Mr. Obama’s health care law allows our hard earned dollars to pay for abortion coverage. The American people should not be forced to pay for abortion, which is why it’s necessary for this Congress to pass the ‘No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act’ and restore neutrality on government funding of abortion,” concluded Perkins.

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So what’s wrong with the President of the United States letting his hair down, going on TV to mix it up with the coven on “The View” and get called “Dude” by comic Jon Stewart? Isn’t that just another way of stripping the Oval Office of its “aura.” Isn’t that just another way of showing you’re not stuck up?

Before we had President’s Day, and gave equal billing to Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday. Little children in grade school would cut out hatchets to remember the boy George Washington and the legend of the cherry tree. For Abraham Lincoln, a tall, black stove pipe hat would be our introduction to the tallest of our Presidents.

A new book, a best-seller by James Swanson, tells the story of the “death pageant” for President Lincoln as his body was taken back to Springfield, Illinois, following his assassination on April 14, 1865. More than a million Americans lined the tracks and brushed quickly past the open casket to pay their last respects to the man they called Father Abraham. It was an unprecedented outpouring of grief. Author James Swanson’s Bloody Crimes contrasts the Lincoln funeral train with the hunt for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

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Check out this new video from the Population Research Institute showing a factual explanation of how President Obama’s health care plan will expand abortion coverage in the United States.

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On the credenza behind his Oval Office desk, President Obama has placed a bust of Abraham Lincoln.

This is admirable, in that Lincoln represents the very definition of American greatness.  Perhaps, though, Mr. Obama might take some time to ponder something the 16^th President wrote in an 1862 message to Congress: “We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”

That was true during the Civil War, and it remains true today, which is why the image Mr. Obama used last night – that we have now “turned a page” in Iraq – is unsettling.

In the sense that our combat operations have been completed, he is right.  And as the President said, our Armed Forces have fought with valor and tenacity, and deserve the gratitude and honor of a proud and thankful nation.

However, it is noteworthy that President Obama opposed the war in Iraq from its inception and, as a Senator, voted against the “surge” that enabled American forces to quell the rising militancy of Iraq’s Islamist terrorists.

This should be said, not to encourage contempt for the Commander in Chief but because it calls into question his strategic judgment.  No one is right all the time, and Mr. Obama’s placement of a major new combat force in Afghanistan under General Petraeus was a brave choice, one opposed by the President’s left-wing base.

It is when his judgment is driven by his statist impulses that our eyebrows should raise.  Mine did when, last night, Mr. Obama called upon America to “tackle (our) challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.”

This calling is wholly unrealistic – domestic needs never animate national will with the same intensity as does a military crisis.  Part of the reason is that we presume prosperity; for most Americans, it’s always just around the corner, and thus fighting for “energy independence,” as Mr. Obama called for last evening, will never produce a martial spirit.

Another reason is that a military adversary is tangible and visible.  Our enemies have faces.  Things like deflation, unemployment, energy production, and technological innovation do not.  They are concepts, not targets.

No national calling can ever be created similar to that inspired by immediate and serious threats to our survival as a people – threats like al-Qaeda and Nazism.

As troubling, if not more, was the President’s inference that we can now afford the luxury of turning inward, as if the cessation of American combat operations in Iraq means we can shift our gaze more exclusively to our own economic needs.

Mr. Obama’s penchant is to “transform America,” as he said repeatedly during his presidential campaign.  Mr. Obama and his colleagues on the Left view the national landscape as a gigantic machine with which they can tinker and to which they can make whatever “improvements” they wish in some sort of domestic bubble.  “Make the World Go Away” is, for them, less an Elvis Pressley anthem than a political demand.

Mr. Obama is bright and sophisticated.  He is mindful of the realities of a grim world.  Still, he seems dragged into global leadership with a grudging sense of duty, not a mature understanding that to be the American President is to lead freedom’s march, not merely walk with it.  He must remember, as Lincoln did, that “we cannot escape history.”

Another young President understood this well.  “Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.”

Theodore Roosevelt saw international leadership not as a burden to be born but an opportunity to be greeted with resolve and optimism.  May Barack Obama learn from his example.

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The National Portrait Gallery, across from my office in Washington, has a fine poster of President Barack Obama. He is shown wearing a rumpled fedora, riding in an open car, smiling that dazzling smile of his, and clenching a cigarette holder in his teeth at that same jaunty angle that was familiar to millions of Americans as that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Every Democratic president tries to recap FDR.

I thought about that poster today as word of President Obama’s most recent misery spread. It seems he has folks in Los Angeles in a fury about his recent fund-raising trip to the City of Angels. His motorcade held up traffic for hours—the one thing you definitely do not want to do to harried California commuters.

This great city ought to be Obama’s oyster. After all, he carried California by three million votes in 2008. But the president is increasingly getting raspberries wherever he goes.

Just last Friday night, he was speaking at an iftar dinner in the White House to a group of his Muslim admirers. I didn’t even know they had iftar dinners in the White House. But he began his remarks in that deep and resonant tobacco baritone of his: “Let me be clear…” He proceeded to offer a very clear endorsement of building a mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. His dinner guests applauded enthusiastically.

Next morning, the president began backpedaling furiously. He was not commenting on the “wisdom” of putting the mosque near the place where 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11, only on the Muslims’ constitutional right to build it. In other words: “Let me be less clear. Let me try to lay down a smokescreen and beat a hasty retreat.”

I can imagine Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) burning up the wires to the White House political operation after hearing that one. He is his party’s campaign chairman for this fall. “Are you trying to lose control of the House of Representatives,” Van Hollen might have said.

The mosque at Ground Zero issue is a 70%-30% split. By a commanding margin, Americans do not want a mosque built near the site of the bloodiest attack yet on our homeland. Public officials who defy the people so heedlessly can expect to feel their wrath in the voting booths come November.

I have a recommendation for our beleaguered president: Do what FDR did. Show less of yourself. Yes, I know that was before the TV era. But Roosevelt knew that the mystery and aura of the presidency was enhanced by making presidential speeches and appearances less frequent. President Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, cannot resist being in our faces 24/7. Hasn’t he ever heard the old saw “familiarity breeds contempt?”

One of my favorite political photographs is on sale at the store of the New York Times. Notice how the people are gathered on the train platform in Warm Springs, Georgia. Franklin D. Roosevelt is nowhere to be seen in this classic black and white picture. But his presence is felt.

Those hopeful, expectant Americans are excited at the prospect of seeing their elected chief.

Like all conservatives, I have serious questions about FDR’s economic policies. And detailed study has shown me how seriously Roosevelt misjudged the threat of Communism. Still, as a political actor, he had no rivals.

An unapologetic Christian, Roosevelt never neglected religious minorities in this country. He faced down the bigots of his day who said his New Deal was actually a “Jew Deal.”  FDR regularly worshiped in his Episcopal Church and his administration was not afraid to express an openly religious sentiment when fighting the Nazi menace.

The U.S. Government published this poster showing Nazis trying to destroy the Christian Bible. The Obama administration is afraid even to mention jihadist terrorists or speak of Muslim extremists.

The hope for change expressed by that Obama-as-FDR poster at the National Portrait Gallery seems to have faded. Now, the only common tie between our 32^nd and  44^th presidents is the cigarette smoke. And, tragically, that smoke probably killed Franklin Roosevelt.

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The marvels of the Internet continue to stun us. We now have at our fingertips the power to reach deeply into our own past and to pull it into our own day. We can access the spoken words of our long-dead leaders and compare them with what we hear today.

And we can visit the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. There, we will have a chance to smile, perhaps to laugh, at the parody magazine cover they’ve displayed. It shows President Barack Obama riding in an open car, a battered fedora atop his head, his head thrown back, and his dazzling smile radiating throughout the room. In his brilliant teeth is clenched a cigarette holder, held at a jaunty angle.

It’s a sight gag. It’s a throwback. It’s a pose so familiar to older Americans that it’s instantly recognizable.

Franklin D. Roosevelt died when I was still in my mother’s womb. Still, I grew up with stories about him. His voice was familiar in our home–if not on records, certainly from TV documentaries of World War II. My relatives would delightedly mimic his head-tossing delivery and his stentorian eloquence.

Now, you can hear him, too. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has archived many original recordings. Included in their collection is President Roosevelt’s great speech from June 10, 1940, delivered seventy years ago this week to the graduating class at U.Va.

For context, you must realize that the British Expeditionary Force, the main British army, had just been evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk, France. The French army was in a state of stunned collapse, reeling from the powerful blows of German panzers rolling swiftly through Northeastern France and strafed from above by Nazi Stukas. Hitler’s Luftwaffe chief, the hugely menacing Marshal Goering, had fitted sirens to the wings of his dive bombers for the express purpose of terrifying the women and children upon whom their wicked fury was wreaked.

The peoples of the Americas looked on as newsreels and newspaper photos showed fleeing refugees. These refugees–old men and women and little children crowded the roads and market squares of quiet Belgian, Dutch, and French villages. French reinforcements couldn’t get to the scene of the battle.

It would not have been surprising if young people in America–those like the U.Va. Class of 1940 –felt that the world was just too threatening a place and retreated from it.. But that is not how they reacted. Despite the terrors of war–in the air, on the seas, under the oceans–the reaction of President Roosevelt’s audience that day was strong, thunderous, and like Roosevelt himself, confident.

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President Obama’s just-issued National Security Strategy has, like most heavily nuanced Obama documents, something for everyone.  What is given with one hand is seized by the other, in near-predictable cyclical fashion.

There are stout affirmations of America’s need for a strong defense extensively qualified by even more dogmatic commitments to a new “international order.”  According to the President, we must “(renew) American leadership so that we can more effectively advance our interests in the 21st century” while  “shaping an international order that can meet the challenges of our time.” 

So … is there ever a time when American leadership means standing alone?  Is that not, by definition, what leadership sometimes is?

Mr. Obama says, within two paragraphs, that “military force, at times may be necessary to defend our country” and that “the use of force is sometimes necessary” (emphasis mine).  Maybe, is, could be, sometimes – there might be a certain trumpet in there somewhere, but I have yet to find it.

Mr. Obama then lurches into Wilsonian utopianism: His new “strategy” “reaffirms America’s commitment to pursue our interests through an international system in which all nations have certain rights and responsibilities.”  This rings of Wilson’s infantile Fourteen Points, through which an arrogant American president tried to impose a new international order on a world that didn’t want one. 

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On April 15, President Obama issued a “memorandum” to the Secretary of Health and Human Services instructing her to prepare regulations that will protect the right of homosexual partners (and other non-family members) to visit their loved ones in the hospital.

In a series of interviews the next day, I emphasized that the Family Research Council does not have any objection to such visitation in principle, as long as it is premised on the patient’s personal choice rather than on a redefinition of family or marriage. However, I also pointed out that the main reason this is even a topic of discussion is because it is used as a political talking point by the advocates of same-sex “marriage,” who see it as a golden opportunity to tug at people’s heartstrings and generate emotional sympathy for their cause.

I further asserted my belief that the frequency with which homosexuals are barred from visiting their partners in the hospital is grossly exaggerated. As I pointed out in an online chat on the Washington Post website,

The idea that homosexuals are regularly denied the right to visit their partners in the hospital is one that has only one source–homosexual activists who want to change the definition of marriage. Where are the media surveys of hospital administrators to determine how many hospitals actually have such restrictive policies?

In the reporting on the Obama memorandum, however, many media outlets cited the case of Janice Langbehn, a lesbian who sued a Florida hospital claiming that she was denied the right to visit her partner Lisa Pond when Pond was dying from an aneurysm. Langbehn’s story is apparently a familiar one in the homosexual activist community, thanks in large part to a sympathetic New York Times article last year.

In fact, Langbehn’s story was instrumental in moving Obama to act. According to the Washington Post:

Officials said Obama had been moved by the story of a lesbian couple in Florida, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, who were kept apart when Pond collapsed of a cerebral aneurysm in February 2007, dying hours later at a hospital without her partner and children by her side. Obama called Langbehn on Thursday evening from Air Force One as he flew to Miami, White House officials said.

The New York Times story last year did report that the hospital disputes some of Langbehn’s charges, but media reports on the Obama memo last week, like that in the Post, did not even bother mentioning that. They were content to repeat the storyline of the homosexual activists verbatim, without even stopping to ask if there was another side.

There is, however, another side. On the website of the Miami Herald, I discovered that the hospital which Langbehn accused of mistreating her has sent its own letter to President Obama. Here is part of what the hospital said:

We would also like to take this opportunity to provide you with some clarification on the allegations being made by Janice Langbehn, whose partner was treated at Jackson’s Ryder Trauma Center in 2007. From the beginning, JHS has vehemently denied that Ms. Langbehn was denied visitation due to her sexual orientation. The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed Ms. Langbehn’s lawsuit against Jackson Memorial Hospital in September 2009.

Ms. Langbehn’s allegations and those made by published articles, blogs, etc., are inaccurate and have damaged the reputations and deeply hurt the feelings of the personnel in our trauma center. They have devoted their careers to all who come through our doors, from all walks of life.

JHS grants hospital visitation to all individuals equally, regardless of their relationship to the patient, as long as doing so does not interfere with the care being given to the patient or other patients in the area. With that said, our first priority when a patient is brought to our trauma center is always to stabilize the patient and save their life. As the only adult and pediatric Level 1 trauma center in Miami-Dade County to support a population of more than 2.3 million people, our facility is one of the busiest – and most renowned – in the nation.

The Trauma Resuscitation Unit in Ryder Trauma Center, where Lisa Pond was treated when airlifted to Jackson, is more like a large operating room with multiple beds separated by glass partitions rather than a traditional hospital floor. Sometimes, visitors are not able to see a loved one in the trauma bay as quickly as they would like or they may have to wait until the patient is moved to the ICU or to another area of the hospital that is better suited for visitation. This all depends on the circumstances of the situation, how busy the unit is at the time and the medical conditions of the patients in the unit at the time. The patients in this area are facing life-threatening injuries or illnesses and are extremely vulnerable.

The most important piece of information to consider from our side of this story is that the charge nurse on duty the night Ms. Pond was in our care – and the person who made all visitation access decisions that evening – is herself a lesbian with a life partner. In addition, numerous members of the medical team working in our trauma unit are openly homosexual. We can assure you that Ms. Langbehn was not treated differently because of her sexual orientation.

When homosexuals complain that they are “denied the right to visit their partners in the hospital,” they may give some people the impression (I suspect deliberately) that in some hospitals they are never able to visit their partners, simply because they are not legally recognized as family members. I pointed out that for ordinary patients in ordinary hospital rooms (the vast majority of hospital patients), there are few if any restrictions on visitation. You don’t go through security, no one checks your ID—you just walk up to the room and visit. Some hospitals have even done away with the tradition of “visiting hours,” and instead allow visitors to come in at any hour of the day or night.

I did acknowledge that there might be exceptions to these liberal visitation policies, such as when a patient is in intensive care. But there was one point so obvious that I did not bother making it (until now)—and that is that in situations of emergency, trauma, or intensive care, hospitals may sometimes keep away all visitors from a patient for medical reasons—not for reasons of “discrimination.” If the hospital’s account is accurate, that is what happened to Janice Langbehn.

Is the thought of a person “dying without their loved ones at their bedside” an agonizing one? Of course. But it is an agony that is probably experienced by many people, regardless of sexual orientation or marital status, every day, for one simple reason—their beds are surrounded by doctors and nurses fighting to save their lives.

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“Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history,” said President Obama today in a major foreign policy address.  “The risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.”

The President was speaking to the assembled leaders of 47 countries, gathered in Washington, DC to discuss ways of averting nuclear terrorism.  His point is a good one: There’s a lot of nuclear material floating around, and it’s imperative that for the security of the United States and our allies America take the lead in preventing it from falling into the hands of terrorists and evildoers generally.

Yet the President, who said last year in Prague and reaffirmed today that he wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons, seems unmindful of two salient facts:

(1) We cannot dis-invent nuclear weapons.  The technology exists.  It is fairly simple to obtain.  Thus, we will never rid the world of nuclear weapons any more than we will rid the world of sin.  We must therefore remain vigilant, never – ever – relaxing the exhausting, expensive and intensive efforts of our intelligence agencies and armed forces to prevent the spread and use of nuclear devices.

(2) By cutting too deeply into our nuclear arsenal, we invite the very thing we wish to avoid: Nuclear confrontation.  As former UN Ambassador and distinguished security policy expert John Bolton has noted, “President Obama has to date failed to articulate any coherent strategic rationale for the substantial cuts in nuclear weapons and delivery systems he agreed to … with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.”  Instead, Mr. Obama has eliminated the leading-edge F-22 aircraft, limited funds to test our existing nuclear weapons and eliminated the missile defenses both Poland and Czechoslovakia had agreed to host on their soil.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for sound policy.  Although Mr. Obama’s efforts at this week’s conference might be noble, the extent to which they are uninformed by wisdom makes them all the more dangerous for the security and vital interests of the United States.

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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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