As Twitchy reported, President Obama on Tuesday directly addressed criticism that he refuses to acknowledge the enemy behind terrorist attacks like the one that rocked Orlando early Sunday morning. That enemy, of course, is Twitter terrorist Donald Trump, and the president made it clear that “yapping” hasn’t prevented a single attack; for that matter, neither has a single one of the president’s many red lines drawn during his administration.

For Obama to have to explain in the final year of his presidency how seriously he’s taken the threat of terrorism says a lot, especially considering that his promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay played a big role in his election in 2008.

Reuters is reporting this week that the president’s January 2009 promise to close Guantanamo probably isn’t going to happen, as President Obama’s pen and phone just aren’t up to the task.

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While the New York Times gathered a panel of psychics — um, scholars — to warn of the dangers a President Trump would pose to the constitutional separation of powers, President Obama has long threatened to use executive orders to close down the detention center in Cuba and move any remaining prisoners to facilities in the continental United States, or “Guantanamo North.” Has his pen run out of ink?

Reuters reports (emphasis ours):

Without executive action, the chances of closing the prison would hinge on convincing a resistant Congress to overturn a long-standing ban on bringing possibly dozens of remaining prisoners to maximum-security prisons in the United States.

White House lawyers and other officials studied the option of overriding the ban but did not develop a strong legal position or an effective political sales pitch in an election year, a source familiar with the discussions said.

“It was just deemed too difficult to get through all of the hurdles that they would need to get through, and the level of support they were likely to receive on it was thought to be too low to generate such controversy, particularly at a sensitive (time) in an election cycle,” the source said.

So, the president who was elected in part on his promise to close Guantanamo is going to finish his term without following through, partially because Democrats don’t want to fight that battle during a “sensitive” campaign season.

We’ll mention it. About half-a-dozen American citizens, including a civilian aid worker, are believed to have been killed in attacks perpetrated by detainees who were released from Guantanamo and returned to combat.

Republicans to this day haven’t given up the fight to keep the facility open.

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Tags: closedomestic soilelectionexecutive actionGitmoGuantanamo BayGuantanamo NorthReuters