TV writer Steve Marmel takes to the pixels of HuffPo to excoriate President Obama for continuing his vacation in the wake of the failed Detroit terror plot.
[T]he only thing that stopped 12/25 from feeling a lot like 9/11 was a failed detonator and a guy named Jasper Schuringa. Weather now seems like a quaint travel threat – like a cold does compared to the Bubonic Plague.
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Meanwhile, the president continues his vacation. News that he hit the gym 15 minutes after being briefed on the attack – and had a lovely time playing golf later that day – begin to trickle in.
America lucked out this holiday season. It’s as simple as that. Something terrible could have happened and It was the bravery of passengers, and the ineptitude of a would-be terrorist, that prevented it.
Not the police bottlenecking the only road into the airport. Not the nice lady making sure my liquids were in the right containers. Not the german shepherd sniffing my boy parts.
It was luck.
And if you’re like me – that scared the crap out of you. You probably wanted assurances. What will be done to prevent this? How are we reacting?
If you’re like me, you’re not looking for Attorney General Eric Holder, or Representative Pete King to be telling you how it could have been worse or how it will be managed.
When the nation is attacked, I expect to be informed and hopefully calmed by the President of the United States.
So I ask, one more time – of this President who understands that how a message is delivered is just as important as what the message is – What is wrong with this picture?
Yes, the President deserves a vacation. Especially this President, who I believe has worked so hard on issues he cares about to the best of his ability; who is attacked and stalled by enemies for every attempt to fix every ill he inherited over the last eight years.
This is a man who needs a break.
But that vacation should have been over moments after the plane landed at noon on Christmas day, and everybody was starting to do the math that once again, Al Qaida tried to strike at this country.
This is no “My Pet Goat,” or sharing birthday cake with John McCain while New Orleans flooded. But it’s close enough that it’s making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up… and I like this President.
On the one hand, it is slightly gratifying to see some on the Left applying the same standards to Obama as they did Bush. Foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but there’s at least some honor in it. On the other, Bush and Obama both displayed the right initial instinct in not immediately rushing to a microphone.
Despite the insistence of a ponytailed questioner during the 1992 debates, the president is not, in fact, our national daddy. It’s not his job to go on TV and assure us that everything will be all right every time something mildly scary happens. Indeed, in Obama’s case, it would be better if he did less of it than he does.
The attempted bombing now looks to be more serious than it first appeared. But it wasn’t another 9/11. Neither thousands of lives nor the heart of a major city were at stake.
It’s a president’s job in the aftermath of these attacks to light a fire under his top people to make sure we get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible and make sure we’re taking appropriate security measures. There’s no reason to presume he’s not doing that; all presidents have, after all. Indeed, TSA has already overreacted, enacting ridiculous new regulations; one hopes the president countermands this in the near future, once the dust has settled.
Otherwise, though, Obama is doing what we should all do: Carry on with life as usual. We’ve now been in Threat Level Orange at airports for so long it’s hard to recall when it was otherwise. The remote threat of being killed by terrorists is something that we’re all vaguely aware of but, otherwise, it’s just background noise while we’re removing our shoes and putting our laptops in a separate tray. Given that we’re still more likely to die in a car accident on the way to and from the airport, that’s probably how it should be.
