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.”