NY Post: Obama's Top Security Expert Full of Puzzling Excuses :: Political News and commentaries

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January 4, 2010

NY Post: Obama's Top Security Expert Full of Puzzling Excuses

Topics: Political News and commentaries, War on Terror

First it was delusion - then denial.

As Charlie Hurt notes at the NY Post, we can only hope the Obama administration works through this vexing 12-step program they're in before al Qaeda decides to launch another attack. First we had Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano assuring us that the "system worked" when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly blew up an American jetliner on Christmas Day with a bomb smuggled in his jockstrap, and just when we thought "Big Sis" had easily retired the award for "Biggest Turkey in the Global War on Terror," up steps John Brennan, Obama's chief security apologist who just happened to have been a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, something he conveniently forgot to mention during his interviews on the Sunday talk shows.

Hurt writes:

After spending a week furiously backpedaling from Napolitano's bomb of an assessment, the White House dispatched Brennan, one of President Obama's top terror advisers, to the Sunday political talk shows to illustrate just how seriously the administration takes your security.

It was not reassuring.

"There is no smoking gun," Brennan whined on "Fox News Sunday." "There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'This guy is going to get on a plane.' "
Really?

What Brennan dances around and tries to defend is, as Toby Harnden writes at The Telegraph, Barack Obama is weak on terror; he knows it and Republicans sense it:

Complacency, faux moralising and partisan shots at Republicans. It was a neat summary of where Obama is going wrong after the Christmas Day debacle when the Nigerian knicker bomber managed to waltz onto a Detroit-bound flight.

For a man who campaigned denouncing the politicisation of national security under President George W Bush, it is worth noting how intensely political Obama's treatment of what might henceforth be known as Underpantsgate has been.

His White House recognised its political vulnerability more readily than it comprehended the level of danger faced by Americans.

As Harnden goes on to note, the incompetence of the US intelligence bureaucracy is not the only thing that makes Underpantsgate so damaging for the Obama administration. Even more serious is Obama's failure to understand or acknowledge the nature of the enemy - and to view war as mere politics. Janet Napolitano, who prefers the term "man-caused disasters" to "terrorism," and John Brennan, who whined about there being "no smoking gun" when looking at the equivalence of "one of those children's puzzles with four giant pieces that have to be laid out of the floor" would have been sufficient to alert us, being sent out to serve as defenders of Obama's mindset and weak policy against terrorism serves as prime examples of Obama being more concerned with political risks than anything to do with our national security. With Obama, Axelrod, and Emanuel, it's always politics first - fact, function, and America, last.

It's what The Prowler aptly calls, "The Politics of Incompetence."

Related video: Bill Kristol crushes John Brennan and lays out a stinging indictment of the Obama administration's handling of the war on terror: