From Politico: Obama takes the heat Bush did not. It’s that “George didn’t say anything about the shoebomber, why are they picking on O?” thing again.

Memo to Politico re Obama: Want your guy to look tough on terrorism? Tell him to kick terrorist ass. Like Bush did. Like Bush was actively doing when Richard Reid was trying to ignite his shoes eight years ago. Also, stop whining. It’s unbecoming. For all the faults of the Bush admin, at least they weren’t whiners. Anyway, Politico and whichever O-paratchiks are feeding them this need to check their history on all the heat Bush took not only for kicking terrorist ass, but for systemic security failures that long predated his administration. And for virtually everything he said and didn’t say.

Important Dem news via Gateway: Obama has been “far more aggressive in fighting al-Qaeda” than Bush. Gotta hand it to them. It’s a big enough lie. Now, if they just keep repeating it often enough …

Democrats claim that the snorkler in chief is more aggressive fighting ‘man caused disasters’ than Bush.
The Hill reported:

Democratic strategists Wednesday asserted President Barack Obama “has been far more aggressive in fighting al Qaeda” than the previous administration .

In an e-mail this afternoon to supporters — which incidentally excoriated Republicans for politicizing the attempted bombing of Flight 253 — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) stressed it was President George W. Bush, not his successor, who relegated the fight against the terrorist network to the back burner by turning “its focus from al Qaeda to Iraq.”
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For the record: In Operation Iraqi Freedom more than 19,429 Al-Qaeda and Islamic militants have been killed. Over 18,900 insurgents have been captured.

The attempt to blow Northwest Flight 253 out of the air was planned as an attack on the United States and very nearly succeeded in accomplishing that horrific goal. The moment demanded inspiring, decisive presidential leadership.

America waited four days for a glimmer.

President Obama's initial response Monday was too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot.

Tuesday, he spoke more assertively, acknowledging what everyone else had long ago concluded: that unacceptable security failures had enabled 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to smuggle high explosives onto a Detroit-bound jet.

Before his first remarks on Monday, Obama had left a vacuum, and into that 76-hour empty space rushed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose ineptitude made a mockery of her position and threw millions of fliers into continuing states of confusion.

Media sympathizers have spotlighted Abdulmutallab's web postings bemoaning his "loneliness." But more compassion and empathy — the remedy Barack Obama prescribed in an infamously clueless Chicago community newspaper op-ed after the Sept. 11 attacks — are useless salves to the terrorist's damned soul. Like so many of his wealthy, educated jihad brothers and sisters before him, from Osama bin Laden to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Fort Hood mass killer Nidal Hasan, M.D., Abdulmutallab targeted us for who we are — dirty, unbelieving infidels — not anything we've denied him.
And for his failed act of self-eunuchery and mass murder, the all-too-enlightened leaders of al-Qaida in Yemen and beyond hailed Abdulmutallab as a "hero."

Another of these "heroes" in Yemen is Jamal Muhammad Ahmad Al Badawi, the convicted mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing that took the lives of 17 American sailors in October 2000. Despite being sentenced to the death penalty, escaping twice
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Read it all

Less than two weeks ago, the Obama administration repatriated to Yemen six detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. It was a test. About 90 of the 200 or so remaining Gitmo detainees are Yemenis. The president would like to move toward fulfilling his promise to close Gitmo, and thus to appease the antiwar Left, by transferring most of those Yemeni jihadists back home.

On Christmas Day, we got yet another indicator of how reckless this obsession with closing Gitmo is. A well-to-do Nigerian jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, tried to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying 289 passengers and crew, as it was preparing to land in Detroit after a flight from Amsterdam. The 23-year-old Mutallab attempted to ignite an incendiary chemical bomb, the components of which he assembled in flight after smuggling them onto the aircraft. He reportedly confessed to the FBI that he had been trained and tasked for the operation by al-Qaeda in Yemen.
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Read it all

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.

Unable to defend themselves on the merits, the administration and Democratic leaders are trying to change the topic to blaming Bush and Republicans. This is pathetic.

First of all, Obama is president. He has been for almost a year. Whatever mistakes Bush did or didn’t make, Obama is in charge — and the issue isn’t partisan score-settling, it’s whether the system he is in charge of is working. It isn’t.

One reason the system isn’t is some of the people he put in charge — Janet Napolitano and Dennis Blair come to mind. Another reason is certain concrete policy choices they’ve made — e.g., embracing a law enforcement approach and, without even weighing the choice, immediately choosing to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal suspect, not an enemy combatant.

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the martialling of “all elements of American power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

I’ve already written about how his isolationist garbage leads inexorably to nonsense like this, so let me just add two points. First, and most obviously, there is no U.S. occupation of Yemen or Nigeria. The only way the airline plot is a reaction to U.S. “occupation” is if you accept the jihadist premise that there are no Arab/Muslim nation-states but rather only one Islamic caliphate waiting to be born. Only in that way does the U.S. occupation of Iraq warrant a reprisal from, say, a Pakistani or Yemeni. And yet, needless to say, if Britain was attacked tomorrow and Obama pledged U.S. forces to assist in the reprisal, Paul would be the first guy to scream that we should scrupulously observe national boundaries and not go fighting another country’s battles for it.
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Ron Paul in true nutter form……

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society.”
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Or in denial…..

For most of the decade about to end, the natural trends of California politics have been partly suspended as the result of the once-in-a-lifetime 2003 recall election and the surreal emergence of immigrant movie action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor.

In two days, 2010 will be upon us, Schwarzenegger will officially become a lame duck and Californians can begin to ponder life after Arnold.

A good part of what lies ahead politically is that the blossoming diversity of the California electorate will assert its influence in ways that Schwarzenegger’s early cross-cultural and cross-partisan appeal stunted, or at least helped to mask. With Schwarzenegger in the governor’s office, Republicans were able to retain their relevancy and delay dealing with a potentially fatal political shortcoming.

That is the obvious conclusion that can be drawn from an encyclopedia of political data assembled in a new book, “California after Arnold,” by two Dem operatives
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Delusions of grandeur

Today, after a vacationing President Barack Obama conceded that both human and systemic failures of U.S. Intelligence had failed to bar a Nigerian man posing a reported security risk from boarding that Detroit-bound jetliner – a near-''catastrophic" breakdown in security – Obama left the reporters taking his words in Hawaii and went snorkeling.

The president was wearing a navy blue suit and white striped shirt with no tie, and spoke only to reporters – unlike a televised appearance sans-tie that he had made the day before. Today, his words seemed sterner. Today, he was acknowledging a troubling breakdown in Intelligence and security surrounding air travel.