Barack Obama's decision to think really hard about what to do in Afghanistan has been praised by most people who aren't Dick Cheney. Peggy Noonan tackles it in today's column, and by "it" we mean JFK and 50-year-old TV shows.

Noonan thinks it is good that Obama is thinking! Noonan thinks it is bad that Obama is not asking the people who've been wrong about everything for years what they would do.

The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad.

Hah. Ha ha ha. The "foreign-policy establishment" is just made up of the hawkiest hawks in the world. The Republicans from Capitol Hill want us to nuke Iran and France.

The cliché that politics stops at the water's edge is a fiction worth preserving. It's a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition.

His Army Secretary is a Republican! His Afghanistan commander was appointed a director of the Joint Staff by President Bush! The rest of the opposition is not serious. At all! The deny Obama's legitimacy, they seek only to destroy him, they are not interested in being "included" because they plan to campaign against whatever decision he makes, Peggy. (Unless the plan is endless war forever with everyone. They like that one.)

But! The important bit is that once JFK gave a good speech about the Cuban Missile Crisis—while his administration was in the midst of having no fucking clue what to do about it—and Obama should consider doing the same thing. But his speech should not be too good, because Americans are worried about the deficit.

Also Peggy used to like the TV show Dragnet, which was about a police officer who told ladies to man up and stop crying, and also he arrested hippies. That is what Obama should do, to show he is serious. The end.