You really do have to question the timing of a New York Times Magazine article on President Obama and his approach to terrorism.
Especially when you have paragraphs that basically parrot White House talking points such as:
If terrorism has not been the driving force of the Obama presidency, neither has it been the catalytic issue to the American people that it was more than eight years ago, when the twin towers collapsed in a heap of steel, concrete and bodies. Yet that mood can change in a hurry, as the Christmas Day plot showed. Obama understands that, if only by the law of averages, there is a decent chance of a major attack on the United States during his presidency. And if that attack happens, any change in policy, no matter how incidental to the facts of the case, will be fodder for critics to blame him for the attack. When the aviation screening and intelligence systems that Bush built failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian with ties to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, from getting on a plane bound for Detroit with explosives in his underwear last month, a number of Obama’s political opponents blamed the sitting president. If Bush’s system was broken, they asked, why didn’t Obama fix it?
It's Bush's fault. And, when things go wrong in the Obama presidency, it will always be Bush's fault, now and evermore.
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5 comments:
Hey Bob, you bolded the part of the sentence that makes it look like the Times was searching for a reason to blame Bush, but you forgot to bold the rest of the sentence that shows it was a response to critics who are blaming Obama. Just a heads-up. I'm sure you didn't intend to mislead anyone.
@Wally: the bolded part states flatly that Bush's security systems failed, implying that the responsibility lay with Bush rather than Obama. I'm sorry, but a year into Obama's presidency that's a cop-out.
Can't have it both ways, Wally. You can't hold Bush responsible for things that happened during his presidency, and then hold Bush responsible for things that happened during Obama's presidency.
The article is basically a comparison of the anti-terror strategies of the Bush and Obama administrations, and the Times unsurprisingly finds Obama's approach to be superior. They rely for much of their source material on disgruntled ex-Bush officials such as Richard Clarke and John Brennan. The main point of my post, then, is validated, that the purpose of the Times in putting the article out was as damage control after an Obama administration anti-terrorism failure.
No, Bob, the precipitating factor was the rush on the right to blame Obama for the near-disaster. The Times was pointing out that the systems that proved inadequate to the threat were good enough for the Bush administration. Is it your position that Obama upon taking the oath of office, should have immediately rebuilt the aviation screening and intelligence systems that Bush implemented? The plain fact is that we will never be able to completely protect ourselves against people who are willing to turn themselves into weapons of mass destruction, and that most of our security upgrades will occur as after-the-fact responses to revealed weaknesses. Sadly, plain facts are of no use to those whose avowed priority is to bring Obama down.
@Wally: one "fact" you keep neglecting is the 7 years that the US went without an attack after the Richard Reid shoe bomber incident, Wally. I'll grant you that over those years we may have grown complacent and standards may have slipped, but at the same time the Obama administration came in with the expressed intention of changing focus on terrorism from a war on terrorism to something much less, so that the above phrase was abolished and Janet Napolitano referred to terrorism as "man-caused disasters."
Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri were less than impressed by Obama's halo and stupendousness, Wally. The Pantybomber incident has at least caused our narcissist-in-chief to realize that Al Qaeda isn't that impressed and that the "war on terror" isn't quite ready to be turned into a law enforcement issue yet. To Obama's credit, he has finally instituted the profiling that should have been in place at US airports all along.
None of the above refutes, or even addresses, my point. But it's your blog, after all. I'll bow out now.
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