Obama a national security risk?

Barack Obama is a master of oratorial tricks to fire up a crowd. He came to the forefront at the Democratic national convention four years ago as the keynote speaker, using his platform presence and flourishes to push himself to the front of the stage. He is only four years removed from being an Illinois State Senator, afterall, using his oratory to force his way ahead of Senate graybeards like Teddy Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and John Kerry, to a commanding lead for the Democratic presidential nomination.

When you squeeze the juice out of the thin gruel of his standard stump speech, you get change and hope. Hope and change. And that's about all you get.

The president, as the nation's number one elected official and commander in chief, is privy to the most sensitive intelligence the country possesses, as produced by the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the military and pentagon. The civil service workers and leaders of these agencies must pass the most rigorous of security checks and clearances, and few are allowed access to the complete gamut of intelligence, that the President and his senior staff are.

This is a scary thought, where Barack Obama is concerned, because his background and political connections might well disqualify him for the most sensitive national security clearances, if he were a private citizen seeking to work for a federal agency. As president, such rigor is bypassed.

Obama's friendships with Syrian national Tony Rezko, currently on trial in Chicago for fraud and political payoffs, and Louis Farrakhan, a race-baiting Muslim who especially hates Jews, by themselves would raise eyebrows. Obama's Church of Christ pastor in Chicago, and a Farrakhan intimate, has many eyebrow-raising, radical terrorist connections.

Obama's stated naivete in dealing with terrorist regimes like North Korea and Iran, saying that as president he would just fly over and talk to them without any preconditions or advance groundwork laying, certainly gives chills to veteran military and diplomatic officials contemplating such a spector.

The resurrected Clinton campaign, after winning three of last week's four Democratic primaries, will get down and dirty in order claw past Obama for the nomination. They can also be counted on to expose a lot of Obama's foreign policy foibles and weaknesses, sparing John McCain and the GOP the task.

In what looks increasingly like a brokered Democratic convention, as neither candidate enters it with the 2,050 votes they need in hand for the nomination, a lot of this will come out on its own, so Republicans can simply quote what the Clintons have already said.

It looks like fun, unless Obama would accidently wind up getting elected. That wouldn't be so fun. It would be scary.