The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

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Obama Promises Terrorists He’ll Try Hard to Meet their Demands
The World’s Greatest Orator* appeared before the press yesterday, and [among] his remarks, …what was to our mind most stunning was the president’s lengthy call for shutting the terrorist detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, a promise he failed to keep in his first term. 

Reporter Bill Plante asked the question, in a way that suggested he sympathized with the detainees: “Mr. President, as you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike [in] Guantanamo Bay among prisoners there. Is it any surprise really that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?”

A strong president would have disputed the question’s premise. Obama accepted it. He said:

The notion that we’re going to continue to keep over a hundred individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity, even at a time when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al Qaeda core, we’ve kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan — the idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried, that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.

Now, it’s a hard case to make because I think for a lot of Americans the notion is out of sight, out of mind. And it’s easy to demagogue the issue. That’s what happened the first time this came up. I’m going to go back at it because I think it’s important.

The terrorists at Guantanamo have long used hunger strikes, riots and even suicide as tactics of “asymmetrical warfare,” as Adm. Harry Harris, then the commander of the detention facility, told this columnist in 2006. One expects the president to project resolve against the nation’s enemies, especially in the wake of a successful attack on U.S. soil just the week before last. Instead Obama’s message to the terrorists at Guantanamo is that he would very much like to give in to their demands.

But it’s a doubly weak message, because Obama lacks the capacity to carry out that wish for appeasement. He complained yesterday that his plan to shut Guantanamo was thwarted because “Congress determined that they would not let us close it.” He didn’t mention that was at a time when Democrats had supermajorities in both houses of Congress.

Terrorists are antagonistic toward the U.S. and don’t care about Democrats vs. Republicans or the White House vs. Congress. They’ll likely interpret the president’s promise to close Guantanamo as a sign of weakness and his failure to do so as a betrayal.

Americans, however, should understand it as an indication that Obama’s commitment to leftist ideology is much stronger than his political abilities.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.