While the Republicans have been screaming about wetting their pants and wetting their pants screaming about terror softies during the past week or so, apparently our president has been doing his job. For most politicians, perhaps even to some degree those from our party, such an effort would have primarily centered on collecting the best retorts and spinning them vehemently back at the opposition, while decrying those barbarous brainwashed thugs from that hateful foreign religion. Anything to mollify the lowest common denominators of our national discourse would have been the tone of the times.
Instead, we got cool coherence in discussing the organizational failure to head off this recent, and thankfully unlucky, bomber. When was the last time we got an actual acceptance of responsibility for a potentially monumental misstep by the most powerful person on earth? Rarely from Clinton (rarely was it needed); I think Carter acknowledged a degree of failure with the Iranian hostage crisis; never in my life can I remember such a forthright admission from a Republican.
"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." Reagan could not recall anything related to arms for hostages. The only thing that came close under Bush was his turncoat adviser Richard Clarke admitting that he and the government failed us about 9/11 (not that he didn't try to tell them). Never has someone been more dead to Republicans than Clarke. Rarely have we been so honorably represented by a career bureaucrat.
Obama has been doing his job. He made brief remarks while on vacation, and he had surrogates do minor damage control and relay basic information. Then he took stock from the intelligence and Homeland Security people over the last few days and delivered us the executive summary. It's pretty ugly.
The father of the prospective bomber, AbdulMutallab, apparently tried to make his son's turn for the worst known to the American Embassy in Nigeria. That someone of his stature would try to warn us and the warning be unheeded speaks volumes about hubris unabated. This mistake is the tip of an iceberg of unseen failures -- failures we would probably be better off not knowing but having our government expeditiously correct.
"Time and again we've learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary," Obama said. "So we have to do better, and we will do better, and we have to do it quickly.
Someone I know made an excellent observation about our penchant for using big picture people on this little picture issue, and it relates to why this needs law enforcement perspective as much as national security perspective. These multinational criminal extremists need people with an understanding of criminal behavior to beat them. Despite this:
How many Americans will die because Barack Obama decided to lawyer up instead of soldier up? - RedState
How has using our military and torture worked as a criminal tool?
We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda," Obama said. "In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
As for the money quotes of accepting responsibility rather than laying blame:
A White House official said that Obama warned his lieutenants against looking for blame and that none of this sort of finger-pointing took place in the meeting, where the leaders of each agency took responsibility for failures within their respective organizations. "While there will be a tendency for finger-pointing, I will not tolerate it," the official said Obama lectured them. - HuffingtonPost
We hear a lot about grownups being in charge, and here is a most concrete example of the theme. He has taken the responsibility, and he expects his people to shoulder it as well. God forbid Obama has to meet the challenges of successful attack, but I would rather have clear-eyed realism than the former politics of fear driving our leadership.