All that TV viewers heard, broadcast from a Marine base in Kaneohe Bay, was the president’s disembodied voice, talking about “deficiencies.”
Citing the attempt of the Nigerian’s father to warn U.S. authorities six months ago, the president intoned: “It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list.” In his detached way, Spock was letting us know that our besieged starship was not speeding into a safer new future, and that we still have to be scared. Heck of a job, Barry.
I'm so mad I want to take every damn person in America on a class trip to Washington, DC, to see how our government doesn't work works.
Maureen Dowd, who grew up there, knows better.
At least she puts the American people in the place they live: in front of the TV. That's what we do: we enter a voting booth briefly once every four years, appoint the most appealing name on the list, hand him a single pre-soaped scouring pad, and send him to Washington to clean it up. We listen to him pleading with us that it will take all of us to pitch in and help and tears come to our eyes and we shout "oh wow, yeah!" And then we go home and plunk back down in from the TV and watch.
But we're not off the hook. What do we do now? How do we (and the government we own) deal with costly problems? We work around them, carefully avoiding holding anyone to account or actually firing an incompetent. How about the people who have been at Homeland Security for years, assigned to manage a system which was built to detect trouble, even as far away as in Amsterdam's Schipol Airport.
Will they be back at work January 4, 2010? Probably. Worse: they're talking about adding huge $100,000 imaging machines to every airport here and abroad as a way of avoiding the dismantling of the system that let us down.
Dowd knows all that, at heart.
One thrilling thing about moving from W. to Barack Obama was that Obama seemed like an avatar of modernity.
W., Dick Cheney and Rummy kept ceaselessly dragging us back into the past. America seemed to have lost her ingenuity, her quickness, her man-on-the-moon bravura, her Bugs Bunny panache.
Were we clever and inventive enough to protect ourselves from the new breed of Flintstones-hardy yet Facebook-savvy terrorists? W.’s favorite word was “resolute,” but despite gazillions spent and Cheney’s bluster, our efforts to shield ourselves seemed flaccid. ...
Back in 2006, Clark Kent Ervin, the former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, told us about incompetence within that department. During the on-air interview, a caller to the show -- the driver of an 18-wheeler -- had this revelation about DHS:
I thank you for speaking up on this because I drive, of course, all over the country and deliver and pick up at so many different places -- ports, submarine bases, army bases. They never check in the back of my trailer. Never. They don't ask for a passport when I go into the port. And the biggest laugh that I've seen is our Homeland Security building whose loading dock is UNDER the building! And no one looks in the back of the trailer. ...Prairie Weather, 5/11/06
And that was five years ago. I think we've learned by now that "Brownie" was hardly the only one to blame.
...If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?
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Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the information did not include a name, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. ...NYT, 12/29
