The New York Times story on the potential terrorist threat to last year’s Inauguration has some fascinating details:

After a weekend of round-the-clock analysis, the nation’s intelligence agencies were concerned that the threat was real, the men told him. A group of Somali extremists was reported to be coming across the border from Canada to detonate explosives as the new president took the oath of office. With more than a million onlookers viewing the ceremony from the National Mall and hundreds of millions more watching on television around the world, what could be a more devastating target? …
The threat seemed to weigh on Obama. He canceled a practice session to go over his inaugural address with aides at Blair House. David Axelrod, his senior adviser, later interpreted that as a sign that Obama was thinking about the suspected plot. “He seemed more subdued than he had been,” Axelrod told me not long ago. Obama had not yet taken office, and he was already being confronted with the threat that consumed his predecessor’s presidency. No matter how much he thought about terrorism as a senator or as a presidential candidate, it was another thing to face it as the person responsible for the nation’s security — and quite another thing again to know the threat was aimed directly at himself, his wife and their two daughters. “It’s not as if you don’t know what you’re getting into,” Axelrod said. “But when the reality comes and the baton is being passed and you’re now dealing with real terrorism threats, it’s a very sobering moment.”

Does Obama grasp the seriousness of the threat? I think so, or at least I’d like to think so; being informed that someone wants to detonate a bomb near your children has to one of the most frightening things a parent could hear.

But then we get some decisions that just seem bizarre or wrongheaded. We’re going to keep sending captured al-Qaeda back to Yemen. We’re going to give KSM a trial in New York City. We’re letting the Detroit bomber lawyer up and we may offer him a plea deal. We’ll never, ever profile in airport searches, and we’ll never, ever use physical force in interrogations. Despite the sense that TSA is already an unresponsive, bureaucratic, calcified joke, we’ll let their employees unionize. After a near-miss that could have killed hundreds of people, we won’t address the country for 72 hours, we’ll initially call the would-be-bomber an “isolated extremist” and the head of Homeland Security will go on television insisting that everything is fine and the system worked.

I want to be able to trust this president with protecting the country, but decision after decision, he makes the choice that doesn’t reassure much of the public…