Terror On Flight 253: Who’s Responsible, Bush Or Obama?
The next time the White House announces to the press that they expect a quiet holiday with no news it perhaps might be a good time to take cover. After a contentious summer and fall spent arguing over the health care bill, and for a short while Afghanistan, no doubt President Obama was looking forward to a nice quiet week…so much for that! Once the dust had settled after Thursday’s averted terror attack on Northwest Flight 253 (and according to ABC News has Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab been successful he could have blown up the whole plane) it took less than a day for the finger pointing to start.
So where to point the finger? Because despite Janet Napolitano’s assertions that everything went like clockwork, it clearly did not go anything like clockwork if a man who was already on a terrorist list (due to be reported by his own father) was able to fly with explosives trapped to his body. How much responsibility for this falls on Obama (whose persistent golf playing is not doing him any favors…just imagine Bush opting for a day of golf after an incident like this)? Perhaps this is a good time to point out Obama has been in office three and a half months longer that George W. Bush was when September 11 occurred (though obviously that incident was of a different magnitude than Thursday’s).
This is perhaps what Bush apologist Mary Matalin had in mind when she told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace (video below) “I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history, and President Bush dealt with it…”
Meanwhile, one of Bush’s greatest example’s supporting the argument that his Presidency had been a success was that no further attack had occurred on U.S. soil. Does Thursday’s incident prove that was just luck? And if it is fair to say Bush inherited the 9/11 attacks is it also fair to argue Obama has inherited last week’s incident (and Sunday’s averted one)? Not according to Rep. Pete Hoekstra (he of the overstated statements)! Hoekstra also appeared on Fox News Sunday and said he thinks it’s absolutely fair to hold the Obama administration responsible (video below):
I think connecting the dots here, it’s not necessarily on this particular case, it’s connecting the dots that we’ve seen over the last eleven months, over the last eight years. What do we have here? This is a international movement of radicalization. The Obama administration came in and said we’re not going to use the word terrorism, we’re going to call it man made-made disasters, trying to, I think, downplay the threat from terrorism. The reality is that it is getting much more complex.
Much more complex, to say the least. Here’s what we know for sure: The only people you can apparently rely on fully when it comes to flying safely are your fellow passengers and their ability to jump across a row of seats to deal with a problem the government has yet to be able to solve. Now here’s hoping the TSA doesn’t decide to strap us into our seats for the duration of a flight as some sort of new ‘security’ measure.
Mary Matalin:
Rep Pete Hoekstra:
