Obama's Blunder

To appease the fundamentally unappeasable left wing, we haul operatives of the U.S. government through the justice system by probing, testing and suspecting them as if they were, well, terrorists; undercut the morale of our main principal intelligence and of terrorist hunters that have escaped the government's notice; and gladden the hearts of terrorists suddenly given to know what small consequences accompany defying U.S. interrogation. Do we risk foregoing vital intelligence that we would have been ecstatic to own on Sept. 10, 2001?

Put it merely in political terms. What's in it for Barack Obama? He thinks to earn the gratitude of ordinary -- as distinguished from left-left-left -- voters for affecting these amazing results? He has not merely handed the Republicans a rhetorical club with which to pummel him (rightfully, I might add), but he has also made it harder than ever to bring the country together over his health care project. No wonder he wanted to go on vacation. In Martha's Vineyard, he can nervously hope the furor will die away before he goes back to work.

In a pig's eye, it will. Special prosecutor investigations aren't like that. They have lives of their own, even when the country yearns for euthanasia.

Around the presidential neck, this spectacular blunder will dangle, albatross-like -- long after Obama starts to wish he'd never heard of the CIA or, for that matter, the left of the left of the left. A trifle late for that now, one fears.