Yet again this week, the (Kraut)hammer struck down on the Obama administration with more unforgiving castigation. He discusses the attempted Christmas day bombing attempt as no one else can – if there is one article you need to read on this subject, it’s his. What I think is so important about Krauthammer’s article is that he does not focus on the blame game or the intricacies of how this passenger managed to get as far as he did (although all important discussions). Instead he focuses on the most telling part of this whole story: Obama’s reaction to the event and his persistence in denying a war on terror.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”
And produces linguistic — and logical — oddities that littered Obama’s public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as “an isolated extremist.” This is the same president who, after the Ford Hood shooting, warned us “against jumping to conclusions” — code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan’s mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.
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Obama reassured the nation that this “suspect” had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant — an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians — and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point — surprise! — he stops talking.
