Obama

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the NSA's surveillance programs, the IRS scandal, and immigration reform.

One might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad—in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week.

In a speech at the National Defense University on May 23, Barack Obama declared an end to the global war on terror. The threat posed by al Qaeda, its affiliates, and those it inspires can be managed, he said. “As we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11. .  .  . [I]f dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.”

We'’ll take the liberty of updating, for the summer of 2013, the famous lines from Auden’s “September 1, 1939”:

We sit in our office

On Seventeenth Street

Depressed but with anticipation

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest administration.

Recently I spent some time surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, who are braver and more committed to human progress, who know more about science and technology, more about business and industry, and more about budgets and expenditures.

This is an experience Congress and the White House should have. Except Congress and the White House have this experience every day. And me too, but at least I know when it’s happening.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the growth of the recent scandals, the media's coverage, and the Republican response.

Some conservatives think that the elite media are finally turning on Barack Obama and his administration.

Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office, “The Buck Stops Here.” Sixty years later, President Obama hangs a sign on the door to the Oval Office, “Do Not Disturb.” In 1978, about halfway between the two liberal presidents, Harvey Mansfield, as we’ve noted before, diagnosed the decline: “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. .  .  . Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on President Obama's recent counterterrorism speech at National Defense University.

J. Russell George, the inspector general who uncovered the IRS scandal, appears to have at one time dated Michelle Obama, well before she was married to Barack Obama.

There is no curse on the second term of presidents. When presidents lose credibility, when trust vanishes and their word is no longer accepted, they have only themselves to blame. That was true for President Nixon, among many others, and now it’s true for President Obama.