The President is pretty mad about the Knickerbomber and his kabloomers.

In typical Barack Obama fashion he said he will not tolerate finger-pointing, but hypocritically added “our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.”

So evidently, what follows is the Obama paradigm:

Mr. President, the intelligence community was not alone in a failure to connect the dots.

Failure must include your flailing Department of Homeland Security, who ignored clear and multiple warnings about this guy, and blame can start right at the head, with a secretary who proudly announced the system worked—the system clearly meaning a Dutch guy with a wicked punch. Secretary Napolitano may not represent the best choice for this essential position.

Failure must include your Department of State, who allowed an airliner to enter American airspace even though at least one of its passengers failed to have a passport or even identification. Certainly, the State Department is going to claim that they cannot be responsible for the Dutch not doing their job at departure; however, you can readily ask the Israelis whether or not people without proper documentation enter Israeli airspace from other countries. Their process is pretty simple and dates back decades: they check for themselves and do not trust the competence of others.

Failure should include your terrorism czar, who has publicly said that there was never a “smoking gun” of evidence that would have trapped would-be bomber, even though many who knew him were aware of his plan to kill Americans and immediately notified authorities, and also stated that buying a one-way ticket with cash and no passport or luggage is a perfectly ordinary event in air travel, and is in no way similar to the exact same things the 9/11 terrorists did. John Brennan may not be your best choice for an advisor on what terrorists do.

Failure must include yourself, as you have consistently tried to airbrush the threat of terrorism as a basic law enforcement problem with no formal foreign policy aspects. You have attempted to bribe and ameliorate terrorists by claiming the United States is a Muslim nation, that poverty and not radical Islamism is the cause, and that you seek to offer only a hand of friendship toward those with grievances. Contrary to early and ongoing advice, you have convinced very evil people that America is weak and willing to capitulate; we are seeing the first wave of what will surely follow.

In short, America needs to drop the act, because it is clearly not working. We need to be honest and say what everyone in our country already knows: that an organization with wealth, means, and power is systematically attacking us with a variety of creative methods, and is leveraging our defensive, denialist posture to buy time and patience to find new gaps in our overly complicated systems. We know full well that the enemy is not an unemployed goat herder in Yemen upset over the fair treatment we have given some Afghanis at Guantanamo; they are 20-to-30-year-old financially sound, well educated men based largely out of Europe or here already in America, who openly attend virulently anti-Western mosques led by outspoken and quite public Islamist figureheads with a variety of financial arrangements to known terrorist countries.

We also know they want to kill us, kill others, and even kill themselves. This mentality is not particularly negotiable, and will not bow to sanctions, diplomatic pressure, or economic incentives. Frankly, they don’t give a shit if you mean well or wave to your Muslim neighbors.

But we also know they are cowards, and when the fight is taken to them, they scatter and chatter, making it easier to catch some of them. If they are captured, they comply. If coerced, they talk and talk and talk. If detained by American military, they stop attacking. If they are being watched, investigated, or questioned by law enforcement, they scrap their plans or tip their hand. They train and study and learn, but even their best student is no match in this regard against the rawest Marine. They continue because we let them.

This is the true intelligence failure: America has never faced an enemy so insidious, so clever, so hell-bent on killing every single one of us, and yet make themselves so easy to deter, detect, and detain. These are the dots that the President must connect. The buck must stop with him.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.