Saturday, May 22, 2010

When Are We Going to Hold the President Responsible?

President Bush, for all his faults, kept the homeland safe from terrorist attacks. Following the horrific attack on September 11th, the Bush Administration successfully prevented or foiled any further attacks despite the fact that Al-Qaeda was at the height of its power and influence.

5 attacks in 18 months, that’s what we have already had under President Obama’s handling of national security.

The Administration has tried, unsuccessfully, to camouflage this fact from the American public by doggedly refusing to use the word terrorist and by repeatedly insisting these were isolated attacks –in spite of mounting evidence of on-going connections with radical Islamic groups. Major Hasan (a serving U.S. Army officer) and the “Underwear Bomber” both had direct contact with an American-born radical imam in Yemen where the later actually received financial aid and training. The “Times Square Bomber”, a naturalized American citizen, learned to make bombs from the Taliban in Pakistan, where he was born.

Janet Napolitano, our Secretary of Homeland Security, is going on television and telling us that these are isolated incidents and that we should be on guard against possible attacks from right wing radicals upset about health care and attacks on the 2nd amendment. As she is making these warnings we are finding out that the Pakistani Taliban, desperate because of our success against them in Afghanistan, is telling us that they are planning multiple attacks within the United States in the coming months.

Left-wing progressives are quick to jump on the band wagon with President Obama in trying to keep the American people from seeing the truth. "If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that," claimed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the investigation of the latest incident’s early stages, "homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything."

Yeah, right, it could be anything like a mentally deranged person perhaps? Or maybe a nut from among the 56 percent of us who opposed health care reform? Everyone knows that conservatives are not above murdering hundreds of tourists to make a point about Obamacare. Baloney.

Why can’t they just give us the simple facts and let us decide what is going on ourselves? Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized American citizen from Pakistan who was taken into custody at Kennedy Airport as he attempted to escape to Dubai, United Arab Emirates was not a conservative crazy upset about health care or immigration. A senior U.S. official said Shahzad told interrogators that he had received bomb-making tips during his five-month trip to Pakistan. That is not some one upset about reconciliation.

Clearly, Shahzad did not work alone. Like Nidal Hasan or Najibullah Zazi or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab or that bumpkin who threatened the "South Park" creators or the 9/11 terrorists or Umayyad and his armies, he received support and training from outside the United States. Yet the administration makes no mention of fundamentalist Islam, even when it reluctantly admits we're dealing with "terror."

Why is that? Such an obvious admission is neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of any brand of foreign policy. It is not a condemnation or an endorsement of the idea that we can "eradicate terrorism". It is the naive idea that if the President can plead for friendship enough times jihadists worldwide will be talked into good behavior.

The Administration has never been shy about calling out despots and extremists, such as insurance companies, Wall Street executives, tea party activists and the Israeli government. This is the Department of Homeland Security that issued a report alerting us to potential violence from right-wing extremists who are worked up about illegal immigration, federal power and the Second Amendment.

If this attempted act of terrorism. or as the President prefers to call it, this "man-made disaster" had actually been perpetrated by a member of a white power militia, they would be proclaiming it from every rooftop in Washington. Since we are dealing with something utterly predictable and increasingly common, they are simply continuing to try and hide the facts from the American people. Even as investigators were hunting for the perpetrator of the botched "man-caused disaster" in Times Square, Janet Napolitano was reassuring the nation that the failed bombing appeared to be an isolated incident -- a "one-off" -- and avoided the notion of (much less the word) "terrorism." Fortunately, unlike Janet, our professional law enforcement agencies refrain from leaping to conclusions before they have all the facts.

The only thing that has saved us from further tragedy has been their inability to successfully set off their bombs. Just how long do you think that luck will last?



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