No wheeling or dealing when it comes to killing

Kudos to Carl Olson at Ignatius Insight

The New York Times ponders the fight and focus of the President:

Mr. Obama has not conceded on any major priority. His advisers argue that the concessions to date — on budget items, for instance — are intended to help win the bigger policy fights ahead. But his early willingness to deal or fold has left commentators, and some loyal Democrats, wondering: where’s the fight?

“The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,” said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. “The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy.”

So far, he said, “It’s hard to think of a place where he’s taken a really hard position.”

It's not hard at all. Here's a clue: it begins with an "a" and end with murder. It just happens to be the one issue on which Obama has always taken a really hard position. But perhaps that is simply a given for Mr. Burman...