Token victories

By J.C. Arenas

The following fact is settled.

Luck, in the form of a failed detonator, prevented another successful Al-Qaeda mass murder attack on American soil on Christmas Day, 2009.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Obama Administration quickly flooded the airwaves with an attempt to qualm our collective fears by declaring that the system used to protect us worked. Even after the backlash of such a ridiculous assertion and the president's subsequent politically-driven "hard pivot" away from it, over the weekend, his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, reminded us that the administration's initial statement is what it truly believes.

Sunday, Politico reported:

White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan is maintaining the system to protect the U.S. against attack worked successfully this year apart from the Christmas Day bombing attempt - a claim that seems to downplay the notion that deadly attacks at Fort Hood in Texas and a military recruiting center in Arkansas represented a failure of intelligence gathering.

Asked Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" about the lead-up to the Christmas Day attack, Brennan said, "Every other day the system has worked this year. ... The system is working. It's just not working as well as it needs to constantly." (emphasis added)

In the administration's perpetual fervor to proclaim token victories, Brennan believes that despite the attempted attack that took place, the American people should be thankful that on many other days the administration's system has "worked". Moreover, the conclusion he's drawn is that since the system has "worked" on those other days it is in fact "working", just not all the time.

I wouldn't buy this argument if I was selling it to myself and paying with his money.

By Brennan's logic, the system worked on September 10, 2001, it just suddenly stopped the next day, and fortunately only on that day did it malfunction. His specious logic has become the standard for an administration that is demonstrably more invested in the creation of Obama's America, a welfare-driven nanny state, than it is in national security. As a result, the administration continues to fail to grasp the reality that we have been and still are engaged in a heavyweight championship fight against Islamic terrorists who won't rest until they see us all six feet under.

Ultimately, the American people will not reward this administration with gold star stickers for fighting a good fight for 11 rounds, despite being knocked out in the 12^th. Then there won't be any damage control messages that this administration can deliver nor will it be able to place to blame elsewhere.

In the meantime, we have to live with the mindset of a typical out-of-touch, insensitive Obama Administration official who believes our families should be able to celebrate the fact that by sheer luck and circumstances, for how ever many days of a given year, we were alive and well, albeit suddenly one day by the hands of a Mohammed Atta, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Nidal Malik Hassan, or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallub, we ceased to exist.

J.C. Arenas is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and welcomes your comments at jcarenas.com