Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 4, 2010
In This Issue . . .
1. Manhunt
2. The Punchline Triggered Predator Groans
3. This Response, So Far, Doesn't Seem That Slick
4. Addenda
Good Morning,
Here's today's Jolt!
Enjoy,
Jim
1. Manhunt
This is how I like my counterterrorism: No casualties and the good guys seemingly hot on the trail of the bad guys. As of this writing, we don't know precisely who placed that car with various and sundry incendiaries in Times Square Saturday night, and the first 48 hours offered everyone a chance to suspect their favorite foe -- Islamists, South Park critics, militia members, lone nuts, and, in the case of New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, health-care-bill critics.
But now, a few details are starting to come to light. Fox News informs us: "Federal authorities have identified a person of interest in Saturday night's Times Square bomb attempt -- a naturalized American citizen who was in Pakistan for several months and returned to the United States recently, investigative sources told Fox News. The latest developments seem to support investigators' suspicions that there was a foreign connection behind the failed car-bomb attempt in New York City, senior Obama administration officials told Fox News, shedding light on the growing body of evidence."
Late-breaking update: "A Pakistani-born U.S. citizen accused of trying to detonate a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square was minutes away from fleeing the U.S. when his Dubai-bound flight was returned to its gate at New York's Kennedy Airport and U.S. officials escorted him from the plane, along with two other men."
Robert Stacy McCain: "When someone pointed out that the bomb was parked near the New York headquarters of Viacom (i.e., Comedy Central), I figured the perp might be a Muslim trying to avenge the 'South Park' Mohammed episode, but I didn't blog that hunch -- or anything else about the Times Square bomb attempt -- because I didn't want to jump to a conclusion in the absence of evidence. And I still don't want to jump all the way to a conclusion. Ace of Spades notes that NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg guessed 'somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something.' And who knows? Maybe there are lots of Pakistani-Americans upset about the health care bill. 'Or something,' as Mayor Bloomberg said."
More from Fox News: "Sources say that evidence includes international phone calls made by the person of interest, who has not been identified publicly. The Associated Press identified the person as a man of Pakistani descent, citing unnamed law enforcement sources."
Somehow I'm not picturing your typical militia member, if there is such a thing, making a lot of international calls. "Hey, McVeigh, I'm all ready to blow up the theater showing The Lion King, but I've got to call Buddy first; you know he's still wintering on the Riviera."
At Hot Air, they offer video of Charles Krauthammer making an obvious point that many of us probably hadn't thought of yet: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's trial in New York City looks pretty darn unlikely now, huh?
It's tough to begrudge lawmakers who know very little and who want to sound reassuring, but in retrospect, these early assessments look a little foolhardy: "On Sunday morning, less than 15 hours after a car bomb had been found in a sport utility vehicle in Times Square, the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, appeared on the NBC News program 'Meet the Press' and said, 'You know, at this point I have no information that it's anything other than a one-off.' Ms. Napolitano said almost the same thing on the ABC News program 'This Week.' A couple of hours later, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, stood in front of a CNN camera in Times Square and said, 'The odds are quite high that this was a lone wolf.'"
I suppose we should be thankful that we were spared any declarations that "the system worked."
2. The Punchline Triggered Predator Groans
At first glance, I didn't care a hoot about Obama's joke at the White House Correspondent's Dinner: "The Jonas Brothers are here; they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don't get any ideas. I have two words for you, 'predator drones.' You will never see it coming." This is standard-issue don't-mess-with-my-daughter schtick, the kind that has been the staple of family sitcoms for decades.
But I was listening to Pete Dominick, a usually left-of-center stand-up comedian who hosts a late-afternoon show on XM POTUS, and he made the somewhat compelling point that a joke about ordering predator drones to kill people sounds different when it comes from the man whose job includes ordering predator drones to kill people. He also noted that the joke would have been safer if the action in the punchline had been more outlandish and unimaginable -- "Don't try it, boys, I'll use tactical nukes."
Of course, over at The American Prospect, the dudgeon is higher than Snoop Dogg: "The Obama administration has spent a great deal of time on outreach to Muslims worldwide, and on dialing down the volume and rhetoric of the prior administration in order to defuse al-Qaeda's narrative of a clash of civilizations between Muslims and non-Muslims. So you have to wonder why in the world the president's speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about predator drones into the president's speech during the White House Correspondent's Dinner, given that an estimated one-third of drone casualties, or between 289 and 378, have been civilians. It evinces a callous disregard for human life that is really inappropriate for a world leader, especially a president who is waging war against an enemy that deliberately targets civilians. It also helps undermine that outreach by making it look insincere. It's already hard enough to convince Muslims that the U.S. isn't indifferent to civilian casualties without having the president joke about it."
The Philadelphia Daily News's Will Bunch saw a double standard: "Let's be honest, fellow progressives, we'd be all over Bush if he made the same 'predator drone' joke Obama told last night."
Don Surber is appalled by the reaction: "Didn't Bill Cosby used to joke about protecting his daughters with a shotgun? But in America in the 21st century, we're suddenly super-sensitive about weapons off all kinds. The blog had a poll. 62% said the joke went too far. Wuss nation."
Of course, this leaves a key question unanswered: Will we use national-security resources to eliminate overplayed, ubiquitous teenybopper performers, and if not, why not?
3. This Response, So Far, Doesn't Seem That Slick
I'm not an oil-rig guy. The pictures of the exploding rig look like something out of Pearl Harbor. I know that there's supposed to be something on an oil rig to stop the oil from pumping if something disastrous happens, and that doohickey didn't work. I offered an admittedly bizarre, black-helicopter question about sabotage a few days ago, and as far as I've heard, we still don't know why this accident occurred and why the fail-safes didn't kick in.
But I'm just some guy writing a newsletter (and a political blog and NRO articles and short videos and appearing on Hugh Hewitt and NRA News and sometimes CNN and Fox News). I'm a little more worried that the folks in charge of this mess don't seem to know much more about this.
Hugh Hewitt: "Every time a senior administration official emphasizes that BP will pay all the damages, it is an admission by the administration that the president's team doesn't have a plan to stop the spill. Two weeks after the explosion, the federal government doesn't have a plan to stop the damage from growing. The people, businesses and environment about to be injured by the oil care much less about who will pay their damages as they do about containing and stopping the spill."
Powerline's John Hinderacker looks at the response so far and concludes: "It appears clear from this record that the Obama administration 1) underestimated what was obviously a major incident with potential for environmental catastrophe, and assumed a best-case scenario -- the opposite of what Ken Salazar now claims; 2) relied for too long on British Petroleum to contain the spill, without taking decisive action to protect American interests in the Gulf Coast; 3) had no real plan in place for how a major spill in the Gulf could be contained; and 4) to this day, remains obsessed with asserting that financial responsibility lies with BP, without any apparent understanding of how inadequate such liability will prove to those whose livelihoods have been devastated. It will take months and years for all of the relevant facts to become known, but I suspect that before too long, the Obama administration will default to its strongest defense: that while its response may have been ill-prepared, short-sighted and slow, it didn't matter, because even an adequate, timely response could not have prevented the destruction that it appears will result from the Deepwater Horizon incident. That may turn out to be true. Whether this defense will satisfy voters remains to be seen."
News like this will raise a lot of Katrina-esque questions of, if there was a plan, why wasn't it followed? "If U.S. officials had followed up on a 1994 response plan for a major Gulf oil spill, it is possible that the spill could have been kept under control and far from land. The problem: The federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand."
4. Addenda
It's Primary Day in Ohio, Indiana, and North Carolina. Vote if you're registered and have a preference . . . |
