Columnist.
It was bad enough last month watching Washington politicians merrily flying off to the U.N. climate change Conference of Parties in Copenhagen (or COP-15 for short), ostensibly to draft a global warming treaty, when all the players knew that no meaningful pact would result and that the only sure outcome was that much energy would be squandered. Now comes the sticker shock.
Political correctness is alive in the Pentagon. Witness "Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood," a Department of Defense report released last week on the Nov. 5 shootings that left 13 people dead. Granted, drafters of the report had to be careful not to say anything that would help the defense of accused shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who has pleaded not guilty. Even so, if the report's purpose was to craft lessons to prevent future attacks, how could they leave out radical Islam?
In the days that followed a foiled attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253, the Obama White House clearly thought that it could bluff its way past the near disaster. Two days after the event, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano contended that "the system worked." The next day, in prepared remarks, President Obama referred to suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an "isolated extremist" -- despite his apparent ties to al-Qaida in Yemen. Later, Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan asserted that there was "no smoking gun" that should have prevented Abdulmutallab's entry into America -- when everyone knew his father went to a U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to warn officials about his son's radicalization.
