The Administration

It remains to be seen how President Obama will explain his decision on the Afghanistan drawdown tonight, but if early reports are to be believed, he has listened to the military and ignored those within the administration and his own party arguing for a shift to a counterterrorism strategy.

If he does announce a withdrawal of only a token number of troops this month, and not front-loading the drawdown, Obama would be heeding the advice of outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chief commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus. Both have advocated keeping a substantial number of the 30,000 “surge” troops through next year’s fighting season. Yet public opinion in general now favors the removal of the troops as quickly as possible.

Why is our president trying to create a constitutional crisis over the War Powers Act?

Under the act the president can engage in hostile activities for 90 days, or he needs congressional approval.

It is clear that the U.S. is engaged in hostile activities in Libya when it sends drones to bomb Gadhafi forces and military targets. It might be less clear when we're spending $10 million daily to support the NATO alliance in its aggression against Gadhafi.

President Obama gave a speech earlier this week in Puerto Rico. What’s significant about that visit wasn’t the speech, or some new stance on the issue that has been the one consistent question on the part of the commonwealth — statehood — but rather, the fact the president chose to visit the place at all.

Not since John Kennedy was president in 1961 has a sitting chief executive visited the island. That’s almost 50 years since the leader of that territory — the president to all Americans — visited in some official capacity.

First there was the beer summit. Now there is the golf summit.

Where other presidents had summits to negotiate nuclear-arms deals or budget compromises, Barack Obama has chosen to meet his opponents in a more relaxed setting.

The beer summit, for those who don’t recall, was an effort to bring a white cop and a black professor together, after they had a major misunderstanding that led to racial indigestion. Obama made the situation worse by calling the cop stupid, and then he had to calm the waters over a few choice beverages.

As photography goes, this one brought the perfect moment. President Obama had ordered the SEALs to descend on the den of Osama bin Laden and kill him. Twelve are framed waiting pensively in the War Room, waiting to hear the code phrase “Geronimo E-KIA,” indicating that bin Laden had been killed and the assault successful. And spontaneously and naturally composed by the moment, it was the perfect photograph.

The Washington Post reports that President Obama’s speech was greeted with apathy in the Arab world. There is a picture of a “rebel fighter” in Libya in dashing beret, Che whiskers and an AK-47. Fifteen thousand have died in Libya alone in the “Arab Spring” — the phrase popularized by nerd American journalists like those who politely raise their hands at Obama press conferences. It was supposed to make Egypt the new Silicon Valley for hip young Muslims who use smartphones, not AK-47s. All conquests are attempts to make The Others like us. This one to make the random hordes of the Arab deserts more like nerd-generation archetype Mark Zuckerberg.

The idea of this slaughter was brought to Obama by his national security adviser, Samantha Power. It can’t be all Power’s fault; the rush to invade — to make Islamabad a hip, Muslim Mill Valley — pervaded the nerd press. But perhaps they had heard expressions like “Repression will fail ... tyrants will fall” and America “cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights” before, from the Ayatollahs, from the Soviets, from the Americans.

In 1971, this sentence started popping up on computer screens all across ARPANET, the network we recognize today as the ancestor of the modern Internet. The whimsical message, it soon emerged, was the work of “Creeper,” the first-ever self-replicating computer program. Created by a Massachusetts researcher, Creeper traveled from computer to computer, displaying its simple message before hopping to the next one. It didn’t delete any files, it didn’t snatch any personal information — it just said hello. Someone even developed a companion program, “Reaper,” that followed Creeper around, removing it from infected systems.

Who can pick the exact date that Moammar Gadhafi joins Osama bin Laden in hell? Will it happen in minutes, hours, days or weeks? Two weeks ago we were discussing the president's birth certificate. Now we are discussing Obama's courageous decision as commander in chief. Barack Obama is now the commanding favorite for 2012.

Who can predict what Mitt Romney will believe next week? Is he still pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-healthcare mandate, pro-con control, and does he still say he is more liberal than Ted Kennedy?  Does he still support the Red Sox? Mitt Romney: the man of many faces. He will not be nominated by the GOP.

Today is Friday the 13th, but after the sort of events we’ve seen here in town and around the country, one would think the entire week was cursed with oddities and questionable decisions … at least for politics.

Perhaps the oddest move of the week rests again at the doorstep of the White House. This time, the Justice Department’s decision to allow family members to visit detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I can’t figure this one out, folks. Less than 10 days after destroying the world’s top terrorist, we give the guy a proper Muslim burial (because the radical Islamists will appreciate our gesture … not), and now we want to allow other would-be terrorists to spend time with family members?

OK, I got my blast email from Obama campaign manager Jim Messina wishing everyone a happy Mother’s Day and, by the way, don’t forget to watch President Obama on “60 Minutes." I have to confess I was going to watch anyway.

This was an exceptional interview by Steve Kroft and an exceptional tour de force performance by the president. It is hard for me to imagine that anyone watching would not come away with pride in the president and his decisionmaking style, his strength of character and his leadership as commander in chief. I can’t imagine, either, not having respect and admiration for the commandos, and the intelligence and planning that put them inside that compound.