The President gave a much anticipated address regarding the Christmas Day terror attack today which was supposed “certainly shock” all Americans.  I have to tell you… the only thing shocking in this address was the lack of “shock worthy” findings.  The time of the speech had been pushed back throughout the course of the day as White House and intelligence officials were reportedly deliberating over what information would be declassified and revealed in the briefing.  Apparently, they decided to NOT declassify the portion of the review that merited such “high praise” by General Jim Jones.

As to the President’s remarks.  I will tell you up front that I do believe it was the President’s best national security speech to date.  That being said, I am not an idiot, so I have not on ounce of optimism in my soul that he would lead me to believe he meant a word of it.  It should also be noted in the name of fairness that the President did claim responsibility for the failure to “connect the dots” that could have prevented this attack saying “The Buck stops with me.”  I’m not patting the guy on the back or anything but I am glad he finally manned up and admitted he dropped the ball on this one rather than trying to pin the blame on a “systemic failure.”  Oh wait, he did spend two minutes calling it that.  Sorry, I almost forgot.

He also revealed the results of his “review.”  He laid out his plan for preventing further attacks.  He even referred to the act as terrorism.  And the real shocker – wait for it – wait for it – he finally used the word “WAR.”  No he didn’t go as far as to say a war on terrorism but he did say WE were at war with Al Qaeda.  There will be some conservatives who will quibble over that departure from the Bush administration position of calling it a war on terror, but I don’t mind calling it what it is.  ”Terror” was always a bit broad for my taste in the first place.  In the words of the flaming liberal David Cross – “fighting a war on terror is like fighting a war on jealousy.”  Slightly dissimilar, but I got the point even if it did come from his America hating mouth.  Perhaps a more accurate description or label would be a war on fundamentalist nutbags and jihadists hellbent on our destruction, but its baby steps with this “progressive” so I digress.  Back to my point, conservatives should ignore the more narrowly tailored enumerated enemy list and focus their frustration with this speech, and this administration for that matter, on the fact that he and/or they have no intention of doing anything more than talking about this matter and hoping they can “review” it away -which the President did so eloquently with this speech.

Most notably….

The President announced that he will spend $1billion dollars on increasing and improving security measures at airports. That’s spending money, so I would say he’ll likely live up to that one.

The President announced that John Brennan will present to him an interdepartmental accountability report in 30 days to gauge and monitor the progress of intelligence agencies in correcting the problems that led to this attack. That’s a another meeting, so I have no doubt that he will have it.  In fact, both Brennan and Obama repeated twice that they will have “regular” meetings thereafter.  Apparently they really like meetings over there.

The President also announced that “corrective steps” will also be taken in four key areas:

1. The intelligence community will begin assigning specific responsibility for tracking and monitoring all leads – I think they can do that one and it will give some low level operative an opportunity to fall on the sword of the next big mistake.  That will actually work out quite nicely for the President so he doesn’t look quite so clueless next time they mismanage information this severely.

2. Intelligence reports will be distributed more “widely and rapidly.”  Haven’t we been trying to nail this one down since 911?

3. He will “strengthen the ‘analysis process’” through his Director of National Intelligence, and an Intelligence Advisory Board will continue to explore long term solutions and shortcomings – Really?  That was a key area – not a matter of common sense?

4. Lastly, we will “strengthen criteria” used for updating our “no fly” and terrorist watch lists.  I think that was earth shattering news number four.  Awesome.

How did any of this take two weeks to come up with?

Look, I am not sure what these brainiacs have been doing for two weeks, but the only thing that I walk away from today with is the fact that we’re going to do “a better job” not screwing up and failing to “connect the dots” and when we do, we will have a system in place to tell us who’s to blame.  I don’t even know if this administration even has a legitimate plan going forward.   I do know that I have learned more about this “plot” through the mainstream media over the last two weeks than I have in an hour of reading the review summary.  So check it out if you’d like but there’s nothing there.

In times like these I really miss George W. Bush.  He would have given that speech day one…. mentioned baby Jesus on his birthday… put on his pissed off face and said “We knew some things, but we failed to “merge” what we knew with what we thought we knew and what we could really do anything about.”  That line would have confused the Hell out of half the crowd with the same level of brilliance as this President’s speech – which took two weeks to prepare and still left half the crowd knowing absolutely nothing.

Michelle Malkin on the great revelations of the day…

PART ONE

PART TWO

Tags: al qaeda, christmas attack, mea culpa, national security, President Obama, terrorism, underwear bomber

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 5:37 pm and is filed under DOMESTIC ISSUES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.