With an awful anniversary should come some perspective

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The observance of the anniversary of Sept. 11 is meant to be a reminder of a tragedy of the past. But with all the terrorist activities going on around the world, the 9/11 remembrance is a continuing wake-up call for America in these frightening times. The major problem we face is that the bitter partisanship these days keeps getting in the way of our finding real solutions to real problems.

Once upon a time, presidents were given a little breathing room when they were involved in delicate foreign affairs. It was considered heresy to criticize a president while he was on a trip overseas. Republicans and Democrats alike restrained themselves from second-guessing the commander in chief. But these days there’s no such thing as restraint.

I’m not a big Obama supporter, but I have respect for the office, and have had the same respect for Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton. Poor President Obama. I have never seen so many so-called experts coming out of the weeds to take a shot at the president. Whether it’s the national commentators or the local pundits, Obama is fair game.

His latest mistake, according to his critics, was his statement that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for taking on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Even my haircutter told me the other day that “it’s time the president had a plan to take care of all of this nonsense going on around the world.” The brilliant columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., who writes for the Washington Post, recently pointed out that President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a lot of heat for saying “we don’t have a strategy” in the midst of the 1938 threats from Japan, Germany and Italy.

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