Something like this has been coming for a while -- really, since around the time that Barack Obama officially became his party's nominee. Just before the Democratic convention, the campaign announced that it would ask the DNC to form the commission, and a reduction in the number of superdelegates was to be its primary focus. As is traditional, now that he's president, Obama and his people control the DNC, so it's no surprise the outcome of the commission's study would be something like this.

That said, though, it's unlikely that this change will have any impact for Obama himself. It's very rare for a sitting president to face real opposition in a party primary. But 2016 is going to be a whole different ballgame.

"I think we all agree that there should be honest debate about these issues, but it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers. Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer," Pfeiffer wrote in a post on the White House blog.

"To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President."

Pfeiffer also specifically addressed Cheney's claim that Obama has been pretending we aren't at war, and won't admit that we are.

"The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered," he said.

When we do know for a fact that Mutallab tried to blow up a plane, we get a presidential "allegedly" ("a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire"), and yet when we don't know all the facts, as in the Professor Gates mess, we get instantaneous certainty ("the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.")

I won't get into the Gates saga, except to say that by the time Obama spoke it was well-known that Gates had shown his identification to the police. so the "already" Hanson emphasizes was simply a statement of fact.

Besides, it's the "allegedly" part that left me slack-jawed.

I had thought that most people, especially ones smart enough to have won the National Humanities Medal, as Hanson has, knew that in the American system of justice, even terrorists are considered innocent until proven guilty. ("Fox and Friends" hosts are obviously excluded from "most people" here.) Indeed, unless someone changed this without telling me, the Supreme Court has said the presumption of innocence "is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law."

So why does Obama use the word "allegedly," especially in a case where so many witnesses saw Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to set off a bomb? Well, hopefully it's at least in part because it's nice for the president to show that someone still believes in the principles outlined in the Constitution. But it's also because the word "allegedly" is standard language for prosecutors and for people like the president; Obama's pronouncement of guilt could, in some instances, lead to legal hassles for the prosecution over the question of whether he'd tainted the jury pool.

"Given the security situation in Yemen and the failure of the Yemeni government to secure high-value prisoners in the past, we believe that any such transfers would be highly unwise and ill-considered. Recent events underscore why this is so," the three wrote.

"[W]e request an immediate halt to the transfer of all detainees to Yemen until the American people and the Congress can be assured of the security situation in that country. We must do everything in our power to ensure that these detainees do not pose a future threat to the United States. Until we are certain that released detainees will not return to the battlefield, all detainee transfers to Yemen should cease."

Now, I'll leave it to the reader to determine whether this is a good point on the part of Graham, Lieberman and McCain or whether it's a politically motivated call to close the barn door after the horses are miles away.

There is one piece of information that seems relevant to that determination, though: Turns out that the six detainees were actually repatriated about 10 days before the senators sent their letter to Obama. Apparently, no one on their staffs bothered to check on these sorts of details, much less talk to anyone in the administration, before trying to get some press for the request.