President Barack Obama delivered a major National security speech addressing what I feel are irrational and politically-motivated phony "concerns" over the president's ordered closing of the prisoner detainee center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The main thrust of the baldly political objections to the base's closing seem to be a lack of confidence in the U.S. judicial system, as most of the objectors--most of whom are Senate Republicans--fear detainees tried in U.S. Courts will be summarily turned loose. Conservative Republicans, led by a conveniently verbose former Vice President Dick Cheney (a man who was notoriously tight-lipped for most of his career), have settled on the Guantanamo closing as their latest attempt to find an issue with which to effectively wound the president. Obama dismissed their attempts to, as usual, scare people as a means of manipulating the public by simply restating their ridiculous claims in a sober light: do they *really* believe closing Guantanamo will mean we'll have terrorists wandering the streets of our neighborhoods? Is our judicial system so weak that we can't risk trying anybody there? No prisoner has ever escaped SuperMax, the nation's top-security lockup and home to any number of terrorists. And the conservatives' phony fear-and-smear campaign continues to leave out the likelihood that some percentage of the Gitmo detainees are, in fact, innocent men being held without trial and likely tortured.

Clarity and sobriety seem to be this president's most effective weapon, as the childish ridiculousness of the GOP's fear campaign become completely evident in the light of calm. More worrisome, however, is how eager some segments of the American public are to believe this nonsense and to accept the tarnishing of American values as reasonable in the face of war and uncertainty. In that light, our enemy isn't bin Laden or Ahmadinejad. It's us. It's our own ignorance and intellectual laziness. It is our willingness to believe foolish propaganda and to be motivated by our fear more than our hope and values. Forget Iraq and Afghanistan, ignorance is the real war we should be fighting.