Bloodthirsty Liberal

According to US intelligence officials, we will be attacked in the next six months That is the Al Qaeda goal.

America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months.

The assessment by Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al Qaeda and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Mr. Blair to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

He replied, “The priority is certain, I would say” — a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

So much for reaching out our unclenched fists, or whatever we were doing. Obama has made us less safe.

At times, the senators seemed more interested in debating one another than in hearing testimony from witnesses. Midway through the hearing, partisan bickering broke out about whether terrorist suspects ought to be tried in civilian courts and whether the man charged as the Dec. 25 bomber should have been given Miranda rights that could protect him against self-incrimination.

Help! I think that’s funny. Can you imagine that these are the people we’ve elected to protect us?

Other stuff: They think that alongside blowing us up in the sky, the terrorist are planning very sophisticated cyber attacks. All of this after a year of pretending that the problem will just go away if we make nice. Instead, apparently the opposite has occurred. Notice that the Obama administration has gotten tougher in both rhetoric and action, but the usual suspects are not screaming about loss of our civil liberties, not marching in the streets, and not producing images of Obama as a mass murderer. I suppose that is a step forward.

- Aggie

TSA guard takes cat nap at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday. The agent has been reassigned to desk duty pending investigation.

Desks have been duly warned.

I post this only to alert frequent fliers to bring nail clippers, plastic forks, small amounts of shampoo—anything—with which to defend themselves should another Calvin Klein killer attempt to detonate his derriere mid-flight. You’ve got to look out for yourself because some of the people we’re entrusting with the duty are not up to the job.

Does she seem chagrined in the least? What would make her think she was safe to pass out in front of everybody at a busy airport? Can we be sure this was the first time—for her or anyone else?

Move over, Gitmo. Make way, Abu Ghraib. Take a hike, Haditha.

There’s a new grievance in town:

The US is risking its ties with Nigeria by asking travellers from the country to undergo stiffer airport security, Nigeria’s information minister says.

…

Another African nation subject to the new rule, Algeria, has also complained.

Oh crap, who lost Nigeria?

And as Algeria goes:

Following the U.S. announcement about heightened security checks for passengers arriving from Saudi Arabia, Osama Naqli, director of the media department at the Saudi Foreign Ministry, said that his country would not tolerate any violation of the dignity of its citizens, their freedom of movement or their privacy for any reason whatsoever, and that the Saudi embassy in Washington has demanded explanations from the Americans in this matter.

To which I hope we responded… no, why bother, I know we didn’t respond in any such way.

But I will take this opportunity to point out that Saudi Arabia is simultaneously one of the greatest supporters of global terror and one of its greatest foes. For every Saudi prince targeting us and our way of life is another with the target right on his own backside.

So President Obama is ticked off about security threats to this country, is he? Glad to hear it:

Reporting from Washington - An angry President Obama said Tuesday that there had been “unacceptable” failures in the American intelligence system that allowed an accused terrorist to board a U.S.-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, and vowed changes in security procedures and information gathering to avert future plots.

The president held a lengthy afternoon session with top administration officials, during which agency heads acknowledged their shortcomings and laid plans for corrections.

“This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous,” Obama told the officials, White House officials said later. “We dodged a bullet, but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked — and that is not acceptable.”

Well, he’s not wrong. But there’s been so much “unacceptable” to Obama in his first year (almost two million hits to a Googling of “Obama” and “unacceptable”), you wonder if there’s any satisfying him. But other than blaming Bush, what’s he going to do about it? (More about this later.)

Administration officials did not rule out the possibility of firings over the incident, although Obama admonished White House staffers and Cabinet chiefs in the closed session not to engage in “finger-pointing” over the failures, White House officials said.

You mean like this?

“Based on what we know now, the State Department fully complied with the requirements set forth in the interagency process as to what should be done when a threat is – or when information about a potential threat is known.”

Thanks, Hill. We knew you had our back.

What I do not want to hear is something akin to the gruel that comes out of his mouth after his absurdist “jobs summits”. (He says he wants to hear all good ideas, but somehow taxes never get cut. Huh.) Profiling people from those oddly similar fourteen countries is a good start, but how far is he willing to go down that road?

More likely we’ll get more of this:

“And so perhaps the biggest change Obama has made is what one former adviser calls the “mood music” — choice of language, outreach to Muslims, rhetorical fidelity to the rule of law and a shift in tone from the all-or-nothing days of the Bush administration. He is committed to taking aggressive actions to disrupt terrorist cells, aides said, but he also considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism. “If you asked him what are the most important things he’s done to fight terrorism in his first year, he would put Cairo in the top three,” Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff told me.”

You see, this is really just sad. If Barack Obama had actually known his father, I don’t believe he’d be quite the narcissist he is. No dad would let his son get away with the crap this guy has become accustomed to getting away with. (”I won” as an excuse to get my way would have earned me a boot in the ass from my dad—metaphorical or literal, as you prefer—and from me to my son.) It is narcissistic enough to think that a speech can change world history (he thinks that of every speech he gives); it is Olympian narcissism to persist in that belief after all the terror plots and threats that emanate from the Muslim world.

Obama turns on Chris Matthews (does he ever!) on the TV, and asks: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the hottest hunk of all?” And Matthews answers “You are, leg-thriller!” But he wouldn’t get the same answer from Ahmadinejad or Mullah Omar or Osama—or any of the other terrorists and thugs who have targeted us more in the last year than any since 2001.

I don’t know what Joan Rivers is smuggling in her underpants (no—cancel that thought!), but I’m glad someone does:

Rivers, 76, was deemed a danger to national security and booted from a Newark-bound flight in Costa Rica on Sunday by a jittery Continental Airlines gate agent who found the two names on her passport fishy.

Her passport reads: Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers. Rosenberg was her late husband’s last name.

The “nasty and cruel” Continental gate agent bumped Rivers from the last flight out Sunday and the comedian found herself alone (her daughter, Melissa, flew out to Los Angeles earlier in the day) and with no ATM card and just $100 cash, she said.

Rivers’ tale of woe put a famous face on travel’s new reality - one that leaves many feeling like common criminals.

“If I were going to make up an alias, I wouldn’t pick Rosenberg. I’d pick Jolie or Pitt,” said Rivers, back home Monday in New York with her sense of humor intact. “Do terrorists wear Manolo Blahniks? I can tell you Donna Karan does not make anything that hides a bomb,” she said.

You think people are kidding when they talk about profiling grannies? They’re profiling Jewish grannies. Widowed Jewish grannies. Widowed Jewish grannies who used to guest host for Carson and have been on TV for fifty years.

And Bomb Crotchit buys a ticket with crisp new Benjamins, no luggage, and enough gunpowder in his drawers to bring down the Death Star.

David Brenner, Robert Klein, and the rest of the habitants at the Home for Retired Borscht Belt Comics are wondering if they can use this same technique to get their careers back on track.

Hey, Michael Yon, no cuts in line!

Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not “arrested”, but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with national security. Port authority police eventually came — they were professionals — and rescued me from the border bullies.

When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.

I always blame Bush! Always, always, always!

Then I’ll blame someone in his administration. Rahm, find me a cabinet member. No, not mine! I never wanted one before, why would I want one now?

Yes, perfect! The ideal scapegoat for our multitudinous eff-ups.

Curse you, Dirk Kempthorne!

The briefing to Brennan was delivered at the White House by Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. In late August, Nayef had survived an assassination attempt by an operative dispatched by the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda who was pretending to turn himself in. The operative had tried to kill the Saudi prince by detonating a bomb on his body, but stumbled on his way into the prince’s palace and blew himself up.

Saudi officials initially thought the bomb had been secreted in the operative’s anal cavity. But after investigating the matter more thoroughly, they concluded it had likely been sewn into his underwear, thereby allowing the operative to bypass security checks before his meeting with the prince. A main purpose of Nayef’s briefing for Brennan was to alert U.S. officials to the use of the underwear technique.

…

At the briefing for Brennan, Nayef was concerned because “he didn’t think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention” to the growing threat from Al Qaeda in Yemen, said a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefing.

…

Quoth former FBI agent Ali Soufan, “The system should have been lighting up like a Christmas tree.”

Perhaps the president’s downsizing of Christmas and Hanukkah this year let our guard down.

This is the second time today I’ve had to call out President Obama on his “isolated extremist” comment. The more we know, the more we know he knew that wasn’t true. I’d ask why he can’t level with us, but I’ve seen no evidence that he can. Demanding of him what he has no ability to perform is cruel, and that’s not my style.

He practically had the flight and seat number of Abdulmutallab handed to him, and he essentially crumpled the information into a ball and tossed it into the waste basket from across the room (then doing a celebratory moonwalk, saying “count it, and one”). If it weren’t for his incessant posturing, he’d have no posture at all.

Oh, Dick Cheney is going to tear him a new one.

President Obama has had to eat so many of his words, I don’t see how he stays so trim (probably because they’re so empty and free of substance to begin with):

“We know that [Abdulmutallab] travelled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies,” Obama says. “It appears that he joined an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and that this group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”

What does “crushing poverty” have to do with it? Abdulchocolatelab, or whatever his name is, wasn’t crushed by no stinkin’ poverty. He came from a family of means, and looked a little chubby to me.

But to repeat the question in the title, why did my president tell me the G-string Jihadist (not my invention, but perhaps better than Bomb Crotchit, which was) was an “isolated extremist” when that was the farthest thing from the truth?

Next thing, he’ll tell me the fellow passengers who subdued the Fruit-of-the-Boomer “acted stupidly”.

No, but he himself does speak stupidly:

The video also contains thinly-veiled criticism of the counter-terror strategy of George W. Bush. Obama says that the current administration has “refocused the fight” against al-Qaeda on Afghanistan and Pakistan, while “bringing to a responsible end to the war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.”

I don’t know why he puts down the war in Iraq so often. If he weren’t so ideologically blinded, he could claim credit for this (even though it’s no thanks to him):

A very good and very welcome piece of news to start off the New Year: No American soldiers lost their lives in combat in Iraq last month.

Combat fatalities have been steadily decreasing since June of 2009, when troop drawdowns in Baghdad and other cities began in earnest. Since July, American forces have suffered five or fewer combat-related deaths each month. Casualties among Iraqis have also decreased to their lowest levels since the war began in 2003.

Said General Raymond Odierno, top commander in the Iraqi theater: “[This] is a very significant milestone for us as we continue to move forward. …”

Obama betrays himself as a man afraid to stand up for himself. He always needs the specter of Bush to stand beside him. Who ever said Iraq was behind 9/11? That comment, and the “isolated extremist” comment (and who can forget the “system worked” comment?), betray him as philosophically unprepared (or worse, opposed) to defending this country from enemies foreign and domestic.

Speaking of isolated extremists, do you think this fellow was one?

Danish police on Friday shot and wounded a man trying to enter the home of an artist who drew controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The man, a 27-year-old Somalian who was armed with an axe, was caught trying to break into the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time, police said.

Police shot the man, injuring him in his leg…

Extremist, sure. But isolated? My ass.

Mark Steyn’s comment:

[A] significant percentage of Muslims in the west do not understand concepts such as pluralism and freedom of expression. A further percentage understand them very well but reject them as loser fetishes incompatible with the requirements of Islamic supremacism - and have a shrewd sense that when, push comes to shove, a lot of these fine liberal concepts crumble to nothing.

Or, if I may observe: never bring a quill to an axe fight (or an axe to a gun fight, I suppose).

Nearly three out of five of us:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure.

Men and younger voters are more strongly supportive of the aggressive interrogation techniques than women and those who are older.

Well, real men are, anyway. The rest of you might as well be women. (Excuse me while I scratch myself.)

And what’s the matter with you 12% who “are not sure”? Someone’s getting water poured down his gullet, thinks he’s drowning (though he’s fine actually), and you’re scratching your head, scrunching up your face, and going hummana-hummana? Take a [bleeping] stand, why don’t ya? Honest to God.

I’m happy to see I’m solidly in the majority on this one, although I’d probably waterboard the entire nation of Nigeria and their dogs to get information (well, maybe not their dogs). So maybe I am still an outlier.

Anyhow, more interesting stuff at the link, very little of it showing confidence in President Pantywaist.

Each gets credit for a year of this splendid news.

President Bush must get credit for the other eight:

So, the year 2009 has been a dismal one for the international regime of nuclear arms control. Or has it? asks Joshua Pollack, who writes for the Web site ArmsControlWonk.com.

“One way to look at it a little differently is not that the regime is cracking or that the regime is failing, but that the regime has succeeded in retarding the pace of proliferation and continues to do so, but isn’t going to catch everything,” he says.

Since the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, the past decade has seen the fewest nuclear tests of any comparable period, notes Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Stimson Center in Washington.

“Never before have there been so few nuclear tests as in this past decade. This is a norm. It can still be broken. But the country that breaks the norm does not gain points. It loses standing,” he says.

Who said NPR was good for nothing? All right, I did. But sometimes even an ideologically blind liberal stumbles upon the truth.

President Bush resisted limits on nuclear testing when he came into office, earning the contempt and opprobrium of the intelligentsia, but the Texas gunslinger had no intention of firing off random radioactive rounds. He just wouldn’t leave American national security to worthless treaties and untrustworthy allies or foes.

So, yet again, boys and girls, let us say what is getting to be hackneyed from over use: Bush was right.

PS: The wonks and specialists are useless, all of them, even when they reluctantly credit President Bush. There is no credible argument—none—that we were less safe under the policies of Reagan and Bush than we are under the pusillanimity of President Obama.

Remember the New York City judge, Bruce Wright, dubbed “Turn ‘em Loose Bruce” by the tabloids for his penchant for letting perps walk?

Well, imagine now he’s president, and you’ve got “Break the Lock Barack”:

“We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with US and Iraqi blood,” a military officer said. “We are going to pay for this in the future.”

The US military has maintained that the release of members and leaders of the League of the Righteous is related to a reconciliation agreement between the terror group and the Iraqi government, but some US military officers disagree.

“The official line is the release of [Qais ] Qazali is about reconciliation, but in reality this was a prisoner swap,” a military intelligence official said…

“This was a deal signed and sealed in British and American blood,” a US military officer told The Long War Journal. “We freed all of their leaders and operatives; they [the League of the Righteous] executed their hostages and sent them back in body bags. And we’re supposed to be happy about it.”

There is absolutely no benefit to releasing a militant Islamist with hands stained by American blood—something the administration as much as admits by letting it leak on New Years’ Eve, the deadest news day of the year. I won’t even begin to try to imagine a motive.

But you don’t have to be Dick Cheney to realize—again—that we are less safe every day that this man is president. Our security comes way down on the list of his concerns.