"...President Obama's 'no drama' handling of the Indian Ocean hostage crisis proved a big win for his administration in its first critical national security test."
WTF.
Ms. Loven then proceeds to write about how courageous Obama was to take such a risk, in prose that demonstrates that she must've drenched her panties while she typed the story. The gushing prose leads me to hope she has a battery-operated device in her pencil cup or desk drawer--or that she at least took the rest of the day off so she could take care of certain matters in private.
In the first place, Obama muffed his "first national security test": North Korea performed a long-range ballistic missile test after telling the US it had better not do or say anything mean about it.
In the second place, Obama didn't display so much as an iota of courage by ordering the Navy to rescue the guy. The press would have covered his ass if the hostage had been killed before the Navy SEALs could rescue him. The death would have been blamed on the pirates, regardless of how the guy died, because after all the guy wouldn't have been in danger if the pirates hadn't captured him in the first place.
I suppose I needn't point this out, does it really take a lot of courage for one politician to make a decision about the life of a nobody who's 8,000 miles away? Even if that decision does turn out to be wrong?
Third, this wasn't anything like "critical". Not for the US. It was certainly critical for the hostage and his family, and to a lesser extent it was critical for the pirates--but for the United States? No.
"Critical" is when, I don't know, a group of people seize your embassy and hold its personnel hostage for more than a year. "Critical" is when terrorists fly crowded airplanes into office buildings. "Critical" is when someone commits an act of war.
But "reporters" of Ms. Loven's ilk will trumpet any success by Obama as an unprecedented triumph. And this is why many newspapers (the Sun-Times included) are filing for bankruptcy: the press is hagiographic towards Democrats and extremely critical of Republicans, and the American public is getting wise to it.