Then: (November 19th, 2009 and decades earlier)

Obama, revisiting Nixon, says 9/11 suspect guilty

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama appeared to be taking a page from Richard Nixon’s playbook Wednesday when he seemed to declare the suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed guilty and deserving of the death penalty.

In Nixon’s case, he pronounced cult leader Charles Manson guilty of several murders while Manson was being tried in a California state court for killing actress Sharon Tate and others.

Obama, in a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, said those offended by the legal rights accorded Mohammed by virtue of his facing a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won’t find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”

Obama, who is a lawyer, quickly added that he did not mean to suggest he was prejudging the outcome of Mohammed’s trial. “I’m not going to be in that courtroom,” he said. “That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”

Nixon quickly withdrew his remark as well, saying, “The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances.”

Now:

Fox News today found a new reason to criticize President Obama's speech on the attempted bombing of Flight 253: His use of the word "allegedly" to describe the suspected terrorist's actions was "Harvard Law School talking, that's not commander-in-chief talking."

On Fox and Friends today, Fox analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. and anchor Alisyn Camerota criticized the president's address yesterday on Flight 253.

Johnson said that he had some "concern" that "there was a detached reserved way in which he was speaking."

posted by Quiddity at 12/31/2009 04:57:00 AM