Soccer Dad

A state of one

President Barack Obama's State of the Union:

Since the day I took office, we've renewed our focus on the terrorists who threaten our nation.

From Gov. Bob McDonnell's response:

But we have serious concerns over recent steps the Administration has taken regarding suspected terrorists.

Americans were shocked on Christmas Day to learn of the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit. This foreign terror suspect was given the same legal rights as a U.S. citizen, and immediately stopped providing critical intelligence.

After analyzing President Obama's State of the Union speech and concluding that in his year in office, the President hasn't learned anything, Barry Rubin concludes:

This is the speech of a man who is arrogantly convinced of his own brilliance and who basically believes that no one has a right to criticize him. He thinks that he can ignore or rewrite the rules of international affairs. It reveals both a temperament and a set of ideas totally unsuited for dealing with the world as it is.

What I find most fascinating of all about Obama is that despite all the externals--his early personal history and skin color most obviously--used by himself and others to boast that he understands other peoples, Obama is altogether incapable of grasping that others in the world think and act differently from himself.

That's partly due to his ideology but also to his mistaken belief--ignoring the fact that he is a Hawaii-raised, Harvard-educated member of a very insulated elite whose life has been largely one of uninterrupted rewards mostly showered onto him as gifts--that they are just like he is.

This solipsism manifests itself in other spheres too. Charles Krauthammer points out how poorly the administration has handled the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Of course, it would have been difficult for the HIG to interrogate Abdulmutallab.

Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived for use only abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year!

In other words the President's priority was distancing himself from the Bush administration. Having an operational plan for dealing with terror suspects was incidental. It's hard to escape the impression that the President lives in a world of his own.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 29, 2010 8:14 AM