How serious is Obama about terrorism?

Just how serious is our new President about dealing with terrorism? Inquiring minds want to know.

Thanks to Barack Obama, we now live in a country where you can do almost as much time in prison for brandishing a knife in a failed robbery as for attempting to murder three-hundred innocent men, women and children.

Don't believe me? This past Christmas, a man in Sandy Creek, NY used a knife in an attempted robbery of a Chinese restaurant and, if convicted, he could face up to twenty-five years in the grey bar motel. On that same day, the now infamous underwear bomber, after failing to go boom, was mirandized and will likely face anywhere from twenty years to life in prison, (if convicted on all counts as opposed to getting off on an insane fashion defense).

What does it take for this administration to understand we can't fight a war with Miranda rights? Does the next would-be assassin have to succeed? Obviously not, as we're only a few months removed from the last one actually succeeding on an Army base in Texas. Twelve dead bodies later and the first thing they tell the next terrorist is "you have the right to remain silent"? Insanity. Worse yet, he took their advice, especially after he got his court appointed attorney, courtesy of the US taxpayer.

Terrorists all over the world are getting night sweats worrying that they'll one day end up in a cozy American jail cell with cable TV and daily exercise rights. ("Please don't make me watch Oprah again! I'll do anything...") Yeah, right.

In a sane world this guy would have immediately been shipped to an "undisclosed location", water-boarded until he spilled his guts and then caged until we're sure that he's of absolutely no use but turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. Then he would be tried by a military tribunal and summarily executed, preferably with the same underwear he wore on the plane - only with a better fuse this time.

But this is the "new" war on terror. The hope-n-change progressive version.

Obama pretended that all we needed was a President who would "extend a hand, rather than a clenched fist". But all the terrorists see is a weakling with a large ego. It turns out that we actually are in a war with people who are serious about killing as many of us as possible - no matter how nice we are to them.

You can't fight these people with smiley faces.

Don't forget that this is the same President who, within a month of being sworn in, sided with his new Attorney General and decided to re-open investigations of intelligence and interrogation methods used during the Bush administration, leaving everyone in the intelligence community as concerned about keeping their jobs as they are about doing them. Brilliant.

Then he decided to give the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks the same legal rights that we enjoy as American citizens, in addition to the public platform of the trial of the century in a courthouse less than a mile from where three thousand Americans were murdered.

The terrorist are quivering at our newfound sincerity. And we're stuck with hoping Congress will bail Obama (and us) out of his ignorance.

Despite all the education he and the liberal elites seem to be so enamored of, he must have been out to lunch the day they taught that you don't show weakness to your enemies, unless it's an intentional illusion. We can only hope.

Whether we like it or not, Obama is the Commander in Chief, meaning that he is responsible for how the national government conducts itself in this war with people who have killed thousands of our fellow citizens would gladly kill millions more.

The only rational response is to hunt down and destroy the enemy by any means necessary. Miranda rights won't do.

Americans might sleep a little better (and the terrorist a little worse) if Obama displayed the same determination in this war as he has in his war on health care.