Dowd Lambasts Obama

In her NY Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd uses her claws to rip and shred the pretense of competency by Obama's administration. These guys have been in office for nearly a year and the Christmas wanna be bomber exposed bureaucratic bungling all through the system:

The president and his intelligence officials stressed that these were not the same mistakes made before 9/11.

“Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence,” President Obama said, “this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

Wow. That makes me feel that all those billions spent on upgrading the intelligence system were well spent.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father personally delivered a neon warning to our embassy in Nigeria, and a State Department employee quickly dropped the ball by misspelling the aspiring terrorist’s name, leading to the false assumption that he did not have a valid U.S. visa.

Border security officials figured out while he was in the air that the young man had extremist links, but inexplicably decided to wait until he landed to question him, failing to notify the pilot of his plane. After all, what harm could a foreign extremist bring to a plane over American soil.

So it wasn’t bureaucratic turf wars that caused the intelligence to fall through the cracks this time. The C.I.A. and counterterrorism agencies weren’t hoarding information and refusing to pool tips. They were just out to lunch.

And this is supposed to be progress?

She nails the character flaw with this:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainly creates an outer disconnect.

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

I love Maureen Dowd. She is over the top, but she nails home a point. You would think that after 8 years of "war" the US would be on a war footing. (Funny, WWII was won 3.5 years of effort and at the end the US was spitting out destroyers and aircraft and tanks at astonishing rates, but in this war on "terrorism" you had Bush unable to provide armour or sufficient troops, and Obama unable to get his guys to "connect dots". It is pathetic.)