Sunday, January 3, 2010

2010, Our Most Dangerous Year Ever

By Doug Patton

Official and unofficial calls for the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, following the Christmas Day attempted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, miss the point. Napolitano is merely a symptom of a far greater problem. Barack Obama himself got it right when he interrupted his golf game in Hawaii to tell us that the failures that led to this fiasco are "systemic." They certainly are, because from top to bottom this administration is filled with people deceiving themselves about the nature of evil in our time. Obama also said that the failure to preempt the attack was "completely unacceptable." No kidding. When did you have that revelation, Mr. President?

The system is dysfunctional because both Barack Obama and those working for him seem to have no clue that we are at war. Instead of calling the war on Islamic extremism by its proper name, this administration calls Iraq and Afghanistan "overseas contingency operations." Obama himself has told us he doesn’t feel comfortable with the word "victory." Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman telling Americans they didn’t feel comfortable with the word victory? They would have been impeached, and rightly so.

But since House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers will not even commit to an investigation of the corrupt community organizing group ACORN a scandal that Iowa Congressman Steve King, a member of Conyer’s own committee, has called "worse than Watergate" formal impeachment proceedings against Obama are about as likely as Al Gore admitting the truth to the world that global warming is a hoax. And, of course, we all remember from the trial of the felon-in-chief a decade ago the difficulty of getting Democrats to impeach one of their own.

This year is potentially the most dangerous one we have faced since the hottest days of the Cold War. The second year of Barack Obama’s reign is fraught with risk from enemies the world over who have learned, to their delight, that Obama has neither the experience nor the will to protect America and her people.

The Communist Chinese hold our economic future in their blood-soaked hands. North Korea builds and tests its nuclear weapons while its people starve to death. Russia deals in weapons to terrorist states. Iran thumbs its nose at the West as it continues unabated on its march toward nuclear capability. Al Qaida plots our demise in every corner of the world.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to feel secure as Barack Obama and his attorney general go merrily along with their plans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and bring known al Qaida terrorists into a civilian court in Manhattan, assign them lawyers and try them like purse snatchers arrested on the streets of New York. (By the way, they will be held in a prison in Illinois while being tried in New York. Has anyone calculated the cost of transportation and security involved in that endeavor? But, hey, we’re creating jobs! Right?)

Like Alice in Wonderland, Americans now find themselves locked in a terrifying psychedelic nightmare from which we cannot seem to awaken a death march to Crazyville led by an alien president leading us off a cliff and into an abyss.

From the plains of Fort Hood, Texas, where an Islamist Army officer waged jihad against his own troops, to the skies over Detroit, where a Yemeni terrorist tried to blow a plane full of innocent people to bits; from violent attacks on our troops abroad to the soon-to-be-not-so-idle threats of a suicide state bent on the destruction of the West, the Obama administration has shown itself incapable of or unwilling to wage war on Islamic extremism in all its forms.

But he’s going to make sure everyone has health care. We’re going to need it when the emergency rooms are filled with victims from the next terrorist attack.

Doug Patton is a former speechwriter and public policy advisor who now works as a freelance writer. His weekly columns appear in newspapers across the country and on various Internet websites, including Human Events Online and GOPUSA.com, where is a senior writer and state editor.