Topic: Newsmax
Doug Wead, in his Jan. 6 Newsmax column, concedes that it's unfair to claim President Obama is soft on terrorism. Still, Wead does so anyway.
Wead asserts that "Obama was too late to talk to the American people about [the Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing]. He was enjoying Hawaii when he should have been out front, instead of sending in his lame, Janet Napolitano, whose defensive answers were so offensive that she has since been banned to the Cheney bunker in the Grand Tetons." Then he asks:
Is it fair? Is Obama really soft on terrorism? Or is this payback for using an economic crisis and the U.S. Treasury to payoff voting constituencies? Or for being too apologetic to non-American audiences?
The fact is that presidents are always criticized this way and it is usually because of a deeper concern. When George W. Bush was tardy responding to Hurricane Katrina, when people were trapped on rooftops without water or food or toilets, in the heat, while he watched football games at the ranch, he was criticized too. It was emblematic, they said. He obviously didn’t care enough about the poor. There was a disconnect.
In both cases, the tardy response is tied to a partisan stereotype. Is it blown out of proportion? Is it fair to say that Obama doesn’t care about security or Bush about black people? No. If Bush didn’t care about poor blacks he wouldn’t have pushed for the biggest AIDS relief package for Africa in world history. And Obama certainly doesn’t want another 9/11. Only Sarah Palin would benefit from that.
Wead avoids mentioning a much more direct analogy: While it took Obama three days -- "too late," in Wead's view -- to publicly speak about the attempted bombing, Bush waited six days to the December 2001 airliner bombing attempt by Richard Reid.
Having thus discredited his own attack, he concludes that suggesting it's justified anyway: "This is partisan politics. But hey, if it forces agencies to work together, if it helps put some spine in Obama’s back, if it makes the country safer, well, keep it up."
Wead has some serious passive-aggressive issues.
