But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

(J)ust to clarify: If you go into every situation saying there's absolutely nothing worth fighting over, you will inevitably end up on a cot sleeping next to a guy named Tiny, bringing him breakfast in his cell every morning, and spending your afternoons ironing his boxers. Or, in the case of the French, you might spend your afternoon rounding up Jews to send to Germany, but you get the point.

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

The progressive notion of the state as a loving, caring parent is becoming a bipartisan affair.

Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?

Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government.