Krauthammer’s Take: ‘You Can’t Trust the Administration’

“You can’t trust the administration,” said Charles Krauthammer on Special Report, discussing the president’s naïveté about the nature of American politics and his troubling secrecy.

Citing the president’s remark, in his first inaugural address, that he “rejected as false” the notion that a state has to choose between security and liberty, Krauthammer wryly observed:

Here he is, the Olympian, the messianic redeemer who is going to abolish all the conundrums of our politics, which is the conflict between security and liberty, and now all of a sudden he discovers that there really is a conflict. In fact, I think every nine-year-old knows that our entire Constitution is a way to try to resolve the issue of liberty and security after the failure of the Articles of Confederation.

The president’s acknowledgement of that conflict has created a problem for him, says Krauthammer: “On one hand he says [in his recent national security address] the war is over, on the other hand he’s conducting an extraordinary, massive anti-terror program, which he is expanding. And how does he justify that? The war on terror is over. Why are you running a dragnet?”