By Mr. Curmudgeon

“By God, our imprisonment has only increased our persistence and adherence to our principles,” Ali al-Shihri said in an Al Qaeda propaganda video. He was speaking of the time he cooled his heels within the barbed wire confines of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Al -Shihri was released from Gitmo in 2007, in the last year of Bush’s exhausted presidency. At the time, he told his U.S. jailers he just wanted to return to Saudi Arabia and help run the family business. Today, he is second in command of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which claimed credit for masterminding the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253, last Christmas Day. According to the Pentagon, of the 530 Gitmo prisoners who have been released, about 85 rejoined the anti-western jihad.

Last February, the New York Times reported, “Eleven Saudis who were released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists are now believed to have fled the country and joined terrorist groups abroad…” The story later said, “Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi who was released from Guantanamo…was suspected of being involved in a deadly attack on the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen’s capital…” The Saudi kingdom’s rehabilitation program is designed to appease their subjects, who support jihadists fighting infidels abroad.

Last August, the Washington Post reported that during a meeting centered on Cheney’s upcoming memoir, a participant said the former vice president described Bush in his second term as “shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that, the implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice…It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times – never apologize, never explain – and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.” Ali al-Shihri can attest to that.

While Republicans and Democrats level charge and counter charge over which political party is the weaker in dealing with terror, it’s becoming clear there is only one man whose ant-terror credentials remain unblemished – Dick Cheney – America’s Richard the Lionhearted…albeit with a pacemaker.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

When George W. Bush was at the country’s helm, elements within the Central Intelligence Agency were unhappy that he relied so heavily on the National Security Agency and the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide. The two groups provided useful intelligence and fieldwork that disrupted Al Qaeda plots at home and overseas. The New York Times, therefore, proved a prime outlet for CIA anger. The Bush administration’s programs to track the flow of terrorist money and intercept telephone communications between Al Qaeda and their supporters here at home were daily front-page stories. But all that changed when Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office. The agency that so failed the country on 9/11 got a gift from heaven…a September 10th president. Recent events prove that the seat warmers at the CIA are back in business.

“The CIA’s Africa desk had been preparing a report on the suspect in the Christmas Day airline plot well before the attempted attack,” Fox News reported, “but did not distribute it because the analyst in charge was waiting for pictures of the young Nigerian.” The analyst in question should be sending his report to Langley any day now – just as soon as he clips the image of Umar Farouk Abdulamutallab from the front page of the New York Times.

When President Obama appointed Leon Panetta to serve as CIA director, he described him as “one of the finest public servants that we’ve had” and that he brought “extraordinary management skills, great political savvy and an impeccable record of integrity.” Former President Bill Clinton seconded that assessment, praising his former chief of staff as “a trustworthy public servant who knows how to keep his mouth shut.” Panetta’s handling of “bimbo eruptions” for a presidential pants-dropper didn’t quite prepare him for dealing with Al Qaeda pants-bombers.

In a speech delivered last May before the American Enterprise Institute, Former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “When just a single clue that goes unlearned, one lead that goes unpursued, can bring on catastrophe – it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.”

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker magazine asked Leon Panetta his thoughts on Cheney’s speech. “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.” Panetta, ever the politician, chose words meant to provide preemptive cover for his lack of intelligence experience and his agency’s track record of incompetence.

The American people traditionally rally around a president during a crisis, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s statement that an Al Qaeda terrorist sneaking a bomb on board an American-bound aircraft showed how the Obama administration’s security “system worked,” dashed any hope of a rally. The president only added to the disillusionment by waiting 72 hours before tearing himself away from his Hawaiian vacation to address the foiled terror attempt in Detroit.

Sensing the sour mood building in the country, and smarting from criticism emanating from congressional Republicans, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chirs Van Hollen issued a statement to his pals at the New York Times. “It’s long past time for House Republicans to put country before political party and work with President Obama and Congressional Democrats to learn from this episode and act quickly to protect the American people.” The self-serving Van Hollen is more interested in protecting his president and congressional Democrats.

Someone needs to remind Van Hollen that the Republican Party is a meager minority in today’s Washington. And that, as Democrat Harry S Truman once said of the presidency, “The buck stops here.”

It appears everyone has gotten what they wished for. The American people got “hope and change,” the media (with the exception of Fox News) got the object of their affection into the White House and Al Qaeda found, that for them at least, the nation’s national security “system works.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The Obama Media is beside itself over the failed Christmas Day Al Qaeda attempt to bring down a Northwest airliner bound for Detroit. As much as it breaks their hearts, they feel compelled to report, no matter how painful, the failings of their favorite administration. At first, they hoped to make Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano the lightening rod for the administration’s intelligence failures. 72 hours after the Detroit incident, President Obama begrudgingly dragged himself away from a Hawaiian golf course to address the glaring U.S. intelligence breakdown. “A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable.” He gravely informed his adoring press corps that he would “insist on accountability at every level.” As the New York Times noted, crest fallen, “he did not elaborate.” After narrowly escaping another bloody terrorist attack on U.S. soil, President Obama attempted to distance himself from his own administration.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd lamented, “One thrilling thing about moving from W. to Barack Obama was that Obama seemed like an avatar of modernity. W., Dick Cheney and Rummy kept ceaselessly dragging us back into the past. America seemed to have lost her ingenuity, her quickness, her man-on-the-moon bravura, her Bugs Bunny panache.” No doubt in tears, Dowd continued using child-like pop-culture references to express her disappointment in Obama’s lack of cartoon rabbit competence, “Spock was letting us know that our besieged starship was not speeding into a safer new future, and that we still have to be scared. Heck of a job, Barry.”

Meanwhile, America’s number one grownup, former Vice President Dick Cheney, told POLITICO.com:

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war?…”

Then, Cheney brilliantly and insightfully answered his own question:

“…It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society.”

And there you have it. Transforming a Constitutional Republic into an impoverished Left-Wing banana republic can be very distracting. Democrats have their hands full herding over 300 million Americans down the death-march road to government-run health care. The bribes to Democratic senators alone required hours of backroom negotiations and thousands of pages of byzantine legislation. The mainstream media is red-faced over Obama’s incompetence and fear Al Qaeda is exploiting cracks in America’s security programs. That crack is the distraction inherent in Obama’s attempt to remake America into something it was never meant to be; to “change” it from the “shining city upon a hill,” which made it a worthy target of Al Qaeda’s dark evil and a noble avenger after 9/11.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama, in a grand gesture designed to demonstrate his administration’s policy of “mutual respect” for dysfunctional Islamic regimes, entered into partnership with Yemen in an effort to make good his promise to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The motive behind the closing is to appease those who claim the prison serves as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s attempted Christmas Day attack in Detroit has put the transfer of Gitmo’s Yemeni jihadists to their home country on hold. Yemen’s “catch and release” policy for Al Qaeda’s terrorists has proved an embarrassment for Obama due the the Detroit bomber’s ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Recently, with U.S. assistance, the Yemeni government launched raids against Al Qaeda elements in that country, which included U.S. airstrikes on suspected terrorist hideouts that killed an estimated 30 militants. Though unconfirmed, it is believed the chief target of the attacks was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born Islamic cleric who inspires anti-American hatred among his followers around the world. It’s believed al-Awlaki’s sermons motivated Major Hasan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, and was an inspiration to the failed bomber on Northwest Flight 253. According to the New York Times:

“…a group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which operates in Yemen and was the target of a recent airstrike facilitated by the United States, asserted that it had sponsored the attempted attack in retaliation.”

So, let me see if I have this right. The president says Gitmo must be closed because it serves as an Al Qaeda recruiting tool, but his expansion of the war on terror to Yemen seems to have inspired an attempted Al Qaeda attack on America.

The jury seems to be in on Obama’s “hope and change.” Here at home, it is poised to reverse the Constitutional arrangement that government serves by consent of the governed into a perverse system where the governed exist, literally, by consent of government health care death panels. Meanwhile, overseas, “hope and change” appears to have replaced Gitmo as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

You know Al Qaeda is running out of ideas when their latest terror manual says the fastest way to paradise and 72 compliant virgins is to strap a Rube Goldberg explosive device to your crotch. National correspondent for Fox News, Catherine Herridge reported that a source in the intelligence community informed her that a similar plot to the one that unfolded in Detroit was foiled in the past. The would-be bomber in that case had his explosive contraption squirreled up a certain bodily orifice. Good taste prevented the Fox News anchor from asking Herridge to elaborate. Al Qaeda suicide bombers are no choirboys, but one is certainly a soprano.

A group calling itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed credit for the failed Christmas Day attack and praised the “wealthy youth of Nigerian decent” for sacrificing his manhood in their emasculated cause. The group also credited the invention of the crotch bomb to their “manufacturing department.” That means somewhere in the Middle East there exists a James Bond-like Q Division, which develops cunning, elaborate and excruciatingly painful weapons for its suicide agents. “There was a technical problem that resulted in a non-complete explosion,” said the AQAP in its statement. The crotch bomb obviously has a few bugs to be worked out. We can only pity the lab rats.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is in hot seat after assuring the American people that anti-terror security measures “worked.” What exactly was it about her Homeland Security measures that saved 289 passengers abroad Northwest Flight 253? “Everybody played an important role here.” Napolitano told ABC’s “This Week,” “The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action …” Jasper Schuringa, the brave Northwest passenger who suffered burns to his hands fighting the terrorist while simultaneously patting out the Nigerian’s flaming pants, is certainly a hero, but there isn’t enough of him to go around. Moreover, it must be remembered that the terrorist’s ineptitude in setting off his explosive device was a stroke of good luck for his fellow passengers. In other words, after billions of dollars allocated by Congress for the creation of a multi-layered behemoth Homeland Security Department, alert passengers from Amsterdam and incompetent Al Qaeda pants bombers form the cornerstone of Janet Napolitano’s working “system.” That means we are all in grave danger.

Even the Washington Post is less than thrilled with Obama’s Homeland Security chief, “Her [Napolitano's] claim neither passed the laugh test nor was remotely true. Ms. Napolitano’s acknowledgement Monday that the system “failed miserably” is the first step on the long road to plugging the troubling security gaps that have been exposed.”

A Washington Times editorial stated, “It is hardly obvious why the actions taken after the attempted attack should assure us that travelers should be ‘confident’ that air travel is ‘safe.’ Nor is it obvious that the heroic actions taken by a passenger, Jasper Schuringa, who stopped the bombing, were part of some grand government design. Mr. Schuringa put out the fire with his bare hands while he was screaming for someone to give him water.”

The New York Times is trying to get their man Obama to straighten up. “Ms. Napolitano’s statement was just one of the targets for criticism after the botched Christmas Day bombing…Critics also took aim at Mr. Obama for continuing his Hawaii vacation for three days before appearing in public to address the threat, and they cast the incident as part of a broader assertion that he is not serious enough about terrorism.”

Obama’s appointee to head the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), Erroll Southers, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans have understandably held up Southers’ appointment because he intends to turn the TSA into a Democratic Party constituency. Napolitano and Southers would allow the nation’s airport security employees to unionize. The lives of American citizens would become just another collective bargaining chip.

Since the Obama administration is not serious about preempting terror, only prosecuting in its bloody aftermath, Napolitano needs to upgrade the Homeland Security system by hiring Dutchmen like Jasper Schuringa to defend American air passengers. They can call them The Flying Dutchmen.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The New York Times is understandably worried. In a rare show of sanity, Republicans recognize it is not in their political self interest to help the Democratic Party transform American into a Latin American style banana republic. “Republicans have dug in almost unanimously this year against legislation that at least some should have been able to vote for…” A sleepy America has awakened, Gulliver like, and found Democratic Lilliputians have tied them to the earth to better pick their pockets, and more importantly, rob them of their freedoms.

“Only solid majorities in the House and Senate have allowed Democrats to advance their chief initiatives this year,” said the Times. “But it has been a mighty struggle, and the size of the majorities, if not the majorities themselves, is in jeopardy in next year’s elections.” President Obama’s love of legislative deadlines is his acknowledgment that with just over a year in office, “hope and change” is nearing the end of its shelf life.

Meanwhile, over at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), co-founded by squishy Republicans Bob Dole and Howard Baker, they hope to do for the Republican Party what a speeding asteroid did for the dinosaurs. “While political differences and debate are part of what makes this country a strong democracy, when partisanship trumps civil discourse it can poison the policies and laws that government is supposed to enact.” In other words, there is no principle so cherished that it can’t be negotiated away. The price of compromise comes with a heavy price for Democrats. Health care votes cost the taxpayer billions of dollars in bribes. For squishy Republicans, on the other hand, the price is a conciliatory pat on the head.

The BPC believes that “after reaching shared solutions through principled compromise, we work to implement these policies through the political system. The BPC is currently focused on the following issues: health care, energy and climate change, national security, homeland security, transportation and science…”

And to think, the internal combustion engine was invented and improved upon, world wars were won and advances were some how made in the sciences – all without the help of the BPC.

Cooperation between free individuals is the hallmark of a civil society. But politics is not a swap meet where all is for sale – it’s just a matter of negotiating the final price. It is the arena of ideas. Unfortunately, many Republicans see politics as a Zen exorcise, where an empty head leads one down the road to enlightenment.

For the Democrats, ideas are simple – power and (our) money. Other than longing to compromise with power mad kleptomaniacs, what do Republican moderates stand for? The answer, of course, is simple…nothing. Yet they hold their intellectual and ideological blank slate to the world like a badge of honor.

Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, seeing an electoral disaster looming just over the horizon, hopes that if Republicans become the majority party in Congress, its moderates will stop saying no to big, intrusive, expensive and destructive government. “Very frankly, my friends, we have to stop that. We have to stop it for whoever is in charge, because Americans expect better of us.” Yes, Rep. Hoyer, they do expect better. That is why they are poised to throw many of your members into the street come election day. The question is whether a Republican majority can conjure ideas that will restore Constitutional restraint on a government grown too dangerous and too large through too much compromise.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

President Obama made his administration’s deluded September 10th worldview official. Emerging from the seclusion of his Hawaiian vacation, the president addressed the failed terrorist attempt to bring down yet another American passenger airliner. “We will not rest until we find all those who were involved and hold them accountable.” Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could not have said it better. The statement is the same dusty proclamation made after every terrorist assault on Americans leading up to 9/11.

After the October 12, 2000 attack on the destroyer the U.S. Cole, President Clinton said, “If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable.”

President Jimmy Carter’s emasculation resulted from Iran’s seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and created in him a kind of post-traumatic Stockholm Syndrome. Whether it’s Hamas or the PLO, the broken Carter now cowers at the prospect of having to recognize the evil of terror. To this day, he remains a hostage to his own September 10th dream world.

Of course there are those who would argue that high-profile Guantanamo terrorists are to be held accountable in their upcoming New York City show trials. They forget that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-killers are in “custody” only because they managed to escape being held “accountable” in the Iraq and Afghan wars. Thousands of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, on the other hand, were held accountable in ways falling outside the jurisdiction of the courts – they died on the battlefield.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

In August of 2007, then candidate Barack Obama said of America’s war in Iraq, “I could not support a dumb war, a rash war in Iraq. I worried about a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences in the heart of the Muslim world. I pleaded that we finish the fight with bin Laden and Al Qaeda.” Mr. Obama’s words were consistent with the view of his party’s leftist fringe that the real war involved killing or capturing bin Laden, declaring victory and bringing home the troops. “A foolish consistency,” Emerson said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The assumption among Democrats was – and remains – that terror resides exclusively in the person of Osama bin Laden. That once the world is rid of his shadow, Democrats can declare victory and dedicate their full attention to waging jihad on what remains of our freedoms. Then, last Christmas morn, a shoe bomber on a Northwest Airlines flight shattered Obama and his party’s comfortable fantasy.

The New York Times reports, “As American investigators sought to corroborate the claims of a 23-year-old Nigerian man that Qaeda leaders in Yemen had trained and equipped him to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines jet on Christmas Day, the plot casts a spotlight on the Obama’s administration’s complicated relationship with Yemen.”

Short-term memory loss is proving problematic for Democrats. On October 12, 2000, under President Bill Clintons watch, the Destroyer USS Cole dropped anchor at the Yemeni port city of Aden. A small boat approached the portside of the U.S. warship and exploded. The 1,000-pound device blasted a 60-foot hole in the U.S. vessel, killing 17 American sailors, wounding 39. Yemeni officials arrested Al Qaeda operatives involved in the plot, but later released them. The foolish fiction that the war on terror is confined to one man (bin Laden) guarantees, as Obama has said, “…undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences…” not for the “Muslim world,” but for the American people.

When Bill Clinton was president, the government of the Sudan offered to make a gift of bin Laden to the U.S. Clinton refused. His reason? His Department of Justice didn’t feel it had enough evidence to convict the terrorist in a U.S. court. Bill Clinton’s staff once placed a banner in a campaign office emblazoned with words intended to keep their candidate on message – “it’s the economy, stupid.”   As the latest foiled attempt to kill Americans using commercial airliners demonstrates – “it’s not bin Laden, it’s radical Islam, stupid.”

“His grandfather was a royal duke, and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford. His brain is as cunning as his fingers, and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the man himself … there may be some little danger, so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket.”

– Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson (The Redheaded League)

By Mr. Curmudgeon

It’s apparent that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is no Sherlock Holmes. “There are different types of databases. There was never information to put this individual [Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab] on a no-fly list,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” “When he presented himself to fly he was on a TIDE [Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment] list, which simply says his name had come up somewhere, somehow.” She failed to mention that the father of the unsuccessful Midwest Airlines shoe bomber, a Nigerian banker and former government official, warned the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria of his son’s Islamic radicalization and affiliation with al Qaeda. The threat posed by the younger Mutallb was “elementary,” my dear Napolitano.

Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab didn’t fit our government’s profile of an Islamic extremist. He was a young man with a good education who was a member of a prominent, well-to-do family. The conventional wisdom says that terrorism is an outgrowth of poverty and its resulting hopelessness. On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, then Sen. Barack Obama wrote the following for the Hyde Park Herald:

“…The source of such madness, the essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from the fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers…[it grows] out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

Tell that to the university-educated minions who flew the hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and a field in Pennsylvania. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, studied at Cairo University’s Engineering Department, attended English classes at American University in Cairo and studied urban planning at Germany’s University of Hamburg. Atta hardly fits Obama’s description of one suffering the terror inspiring effects of “poverty and ignorance.”

In Alan B. Krueger’s book “What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism,” Krueger writes:

“Instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, to understand what makes a terrorist we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose their extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead they are people who care so deeply and fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.”

It is well known that Britain’s University system has been an important radicalization and technical training center for Muslim students. Azahari bin Husin received his doctorate in engineering in Britain. He later became the bomb-maker responsible for the Oct. 12, 2002 Bali bombing attack. Ramzi Yousef earned his engineering degree from Swansea Institute of Higher Education before participating in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. And who could forget sweet Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi, a.k.a., “Dr. Germ.” She received her PhD from the University of East Anglia (currently the center for global warning research), eventually returning home to Iraq to build Saddam Hussein’s biological warfare program.

The radicalization of Islamic university students has its roots in the formation in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood. Founder Hassan al-Banna laid out what would be his organization’s aim:

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law [Sharia] on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Al-Banna would later recognize a kindred spirit in the person of Adolph Hitler, translating the German Fuhrer’s “Mein Kampf” into an Arabic version called “My Jihad.”

Former U.S. counter-terrorism official, Richard Clark, testified before the 9/11 commission saying, “The common link here is the extremist Muslim Brotherhood – all of these organizations [Hamas, al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad] are descendants of the membership and ideology of the Muslim Brothers.”

Meanwhile, in fat and happy North America, the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys a secure presence on many a university campus. The Muslim Student Association (MSA) maintains 600 chapters – and 150 affiliates – throughout the United States and Canada. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood founded the MSA in January 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Modern universities – factories of empty nihilism – provide the tools necessary to build a career and a well-stocked bank account, but leaves many students seeking something more. That’s where the Professor Moriarty’s of this world come in. If, as G.K. Chesterton said, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another,” the Muslim Brotherhood is successfully transmitting its dark soul to millions of empty but educated souls around the world.

Sherlock Holmes described the educated criminal John Clay as having a brain “as cunning as his fingers, and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the man himself.” Elementary, my dear Holmes – he’s not living in a squalid Middle East village eking out a meager existence. He is studying engineering at the local University.