Obama can’t keep us safe

This startling exchange between a reporter and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano illustrates the profound wrong-headedness of the Obama administration in prosecuting the war on terror.

Reporter: If the British refused to allow Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab into their country, why didn't the United States do the same?

Napolitano: "We'd all like to know the answer to that question."

Indeed we would. We'd also like the answer to this question: Do we have a commander in chief, surrounded by like-minded incompetents like Napolitano, who can't keep us safe because in their heart of hearts they identify less with the Bush administration's effective post-9/11 anti-terrorism actions than with the radical Muslim terrorists who seek to do us harm?

Hate to sound like Col. Nathan Jessep in the movie "A Few Good Men," but that's the truth. America has elected a dangerously naive president who fails to understand the evil nature of our brutal and determined adversaries.

If you can't handle that truth, then at least consider the facts: When Abdulmutallab's father reported his son had been "radicalized" and posed a possible danger, America's terror security shield, now wielded by the limp-gripped, politically correct Obama administration, put a note in the guy's file for later review.

The Brits, meanwhile, with much less-serious, less-specific information -- Abdulmutallab put a bogus school on his student visa application -- took the Col. Jessep approach and put this budding terrorist on an official watch list that banned him from entering their country. Guess which country wasn't targeted?

If this is what it takes to wake up Obama to the evils of this world, then he learned an easy lesson. But tell that to the personnel who lost their lives to terrorism at Fort Hood.

Then, as now, the Obama administration fails to swiftly acknowledge the threat. They demur in describing our enemy as radical Muslims. They plan to close the offshore prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and transfer the prisoners to the United States. They give the enemy combatants who killed more than 3,000 people on 9/11 the privilege of a civilian federal trial in New York City when a military tribunal is more appropriate. And for three days our president failed to address his people directly on Abdulmutallab's failed effort to blow up a commercial flight over Detroit on Christmas Day. All of this on top of President Obama's noticeable refusal to characterize our struggle as a "war" on "terror."

In the wake of fierce criticism, Obama now talks tough about keeping America safe. But in the two cases of domestic terrorism since 9/11 -- both on Obama's watch -- red flags flew aplenty.

We don't need yet another defensive explanation of how Obama charges failed to recognize the warning signs as much as we need a national town hall meeting on how Obama himself, by world view and policy priorities, is not up to the task of keeping us safe.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.