Guess What's Coming To Dinner

The Hussein administration's new anti-terrorism policy: if we don't talk about terrorism, maybe the terrorists will go away:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoids mention of the terms "terrorism" or "Sept. 11" in remarks prepared for her first congressional testimony since taking office, signaling a sharp change in tone from her predecessors.

Napolitano is the first homeland security secretary to drop the term "terror" and "vulnerability" from remarks prepared for delivery to the House Homeland Security Committee, according to a copy obtained by The Ass[hole]iated Press....

Napolitano, a former Arizona governor, instead charts a course in very different terms than Chertoff, who used law enforcement and military jargon -- "intelligence," "analysis," "mission" -- to describe the agency's objectives.

The department's top priorities are spelled out in legislation that created it in 2001: preventing a terrorist attack in the United States; reducing the vulnerability for such an attack; and helping with the recovery if the U.S. is attacked.

Napolitano's prepared remarks also show her using the word "attacks" less than her predecessors. She is the first secretary to use a congressional debut to talk about hurricanes and disasters, a sign of the department's evolving mission following Hurricane Katrina.

Napolitano is not alone in her departure from terror talk.

President Barack Obama largely has avoided using the term "war on terror," although it has not been scrubbed from the White House lexicon.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee does not mention terrorism or September 11 in his prepared remarks for Wednesday's hearing either. Securing the borders, responding to natural disasters, ensuring transportation safety, protecting critical infrastructure and administering grants are the priorities, Democrat Bennie Thompson says.

I'd call this the rhetorical equivalent of pulling the covers over our heads making the monsters under the bed go away except that even that implicitly acknowledges the monsters.  It isn't even quite like the metaphor of refraining from uttering a demon's name for fear of causing it to appear.  This is an ideological declaration that terrorism doesn't exist, that 9/11 never happened, and that we're not at war with the forces and regimes of Islamic Fundamentalism.  It is a passive version of the "Big Brother" totalitarianism of the George Orwell novel 1984.  Democrats do not want to continue the Bush Administration's 100% successful vigilence against al Qaeda, Hezbollah, et al (plus the home-grown variety), therefore it will, by official government diktat, be September 10, 2001 forever (except for Bush and the GOP running the government).

And that will last right up until the next mass-casualty attack that will be facilitated by this neo-9/10 mentality, just like the "Holy Tuesday" attacks before it.  And once again, there will be a political reckoning.

As it is at home, so shall it be overseas, says global terrorism expert Walid Phares:

Phares says President Barack Obama’s decision to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan could lead to a Vietnam-like quagmire, as some are suggesting.

“If we send soldiers to Afghanistan to fight for a while, and then reach a level where we cannot achieve more on the political and diplomatic level — if we begin to negotiate with a number of Taliban, bringing them to the government without supporting democratic forces in Afghanistan — then that would look more like Vietnam,” Phares explains.

“I hope this move to send two divisions to Afghanistan — which is the result of our commanders on the ground requesting this and General [David] Petraeus requesting this — will be part of a much wider diplomatic, political and even economic initiative that would allow the Afghani people to take the fight. It’s important they use what we are offering so that they could continue in this war against the Taliban.”

Of course, Generalissimo Hussein didn't transfer those two divisions to the Afghan front because General Petraeus requested it; he did so because of the regional reverses his own weak-assed foreign policy debut triggered:

With a grinning Goliath staggering about sporting a "kick me" sign on his back, even reputed allies joined the fun. Pakistan freed from house arrest A.Q. Khan, the notorious proliferator who sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. Ten days later, Islamabad capitulated to the Taliban, turning over to its tender mercies the Swat Valley, 100 miles from the capital. Not only will sharia law now reign there, but members of the democratically elected secular party will be hunted as the Pakistani army stands down.

These Pakistani capitulations may account for Obama's hastily announced 17,000-troop increase in Afghanistan even before his various heralded reviews of the mission have been completed. Hasty, unexplained, but at least something. Other than that, a month of pummeling has been met with utter passivity.

That passivity - and the pacifism that underlies it - render that troop transfer strategically meaningless.  al Qaeda and the Taliban had every reason to take George W. Bush seriously because he backed up tough rhetoric with force.  He toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan in the first place, after all, and he liberated Iraq.  It's why Libya's Khaddafy voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons program - he didn't want to end up hiding in a spider hole like Saddam Hussein.  When a president's foreign policy pronouncements have track-record credibility behind them, they carry more weight, and America's enemies discount them at their peril.

Not so with the Chicago Cherubim, whose philosophy is "speaking softly and carry no stick."  For such a man, shifting 17,000 troops is little more than a short-term ass-covering gesture to put out a PR brush fire that might otherwise distract from his domestic communization project.  Does anybody really believe that he's committed to keeping Afghanistan and Pakistan (and its nukes) free?  Is he willing to do there as George W. Bush did in Iraq - endure escalating casualties (and the PR heat therein) in a tough anti-insurgency fight that we cannot lose if we stick with the mission to the finish?  Or will B.O. become the twenty-first century LBJ, settling for less and less and less than victory until we end up running for our lives from the ragged Islamist berserkers - with the difference from the Vienam experience being that they, unlike the VC, will chase us all the way home?

C'mon, folks, you know how rhetorical a question that is, dontcha?

That's what makes VP Rogaine's candor last fall so remarkable.  It's only been five weeks, and Red Barry has been "tested" by pretty much all our enemies already, and found to be an utter and complete jabrone.  Under his criminally negligent stewardship, the United States and any country unfortunate enough to be identified as its ally will be easy pickings for the Russians, the ChiComms, the Iranian mullahgarchy, the NoKos, Uncle Hugo, and of course, Osama bin Laden, who has been bequeathed his own public relations Jem'Haddar personal cloaking device by this solopsistic administration, so bereft of patriotism, courage, and scrote that it dares not even speak their names.

Watching this one of several Obamunist train wrecks would be side-splitting were not this one guaranteed to be floating in blood.