After a series of successful and unsuccessful jihad attacks across this great nation, on Christmas day the crotch bomber struck, attempting to explode a bomb hidden in his underwear while landing in Detroit on Northwest Flight 253. And so after months of ignoring the jihad against America and pretending that nothing was happening, Barack Obama sprang into action — with useless, toothless reform.

In the wake of the Christmas Day bomber’s attempted attack, the US Visas Viper terrorist reporting program criteria have been broadened.

The Visas Viper program is used by the Department of State and other national agencies to place on “watch lists” known or suspected international terrorists in unclassified and classified government look out systems such as CLASS (Consular Lookout and Support Systems).

So it’s a good thing that Obama is broadening the criteria for reporting terrorists in this program, isn’t it? Actually, no. Make no mistake: it is not going to help whatsoever. Obama’s “tough” new criteria don’t let us filter out potential terrorists using minimal profiling criteria.

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On the foreign policy front, the Democrats for years have blamed America for the actions of rogue nations and dictators.  Indeed, as Mona Charen pointed out at length, in her book Useful Idiots, the Democrats have been all too willing to Blame America First for the actions of others.  So the storyline goes, when Russia armed itself, it was a justified response to the American arms buildup – as if Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were otherwise peace loving souls.

No mere academic cheer for Democrats, they have campaigned on their Blame America First theme for years.  In the minds of those Democrats, rather than display arrogance, America must be more humble, except blame for World troubles and not seek to impose its view on the world.  The latest iteration of that, of course, was Obama’s campaign.

According to Obama, following 9/11:

Millions around the world were ready to stand with us. They were willing to rally to our cause because it was their cause too – because they knew that if America led the world toward a new era of global cooperation, it would advance the security of people in our nation and all nations.” According to Obama, however, the Bush Administration “squandered that opportunity . . . [and]  . . . World opinion has turned against us.

What is the cure for such “mistakes,” according to Obama? As we have seen, it is to apologize on his world tours for American actions, to promise to talk directly to dictators, to abandon missile systems, to speak softly in the face of phony Iranian elections and crack downs on dissent, to bow in front of dictators, wear a thin mustache in front Middle Eastern leaders in Egypt, preach global responsibility, promise to close Guantanamo, give rights to Interpol over US territory, and on and on.

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According to Reuters, Dutch authorities have announced that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the terrorist who penetrated the Dutch security system on Christmas Day on Flight 253 to Detroit, acted alone with no accomplices at the Amsterdam airport.

This directly contradicts the first-hand, eye-witness account from Kurt Haskell, a lawyer from Taylor, Michigan who was on board Flight 253.  We have reported Mr. Haskell’s account here at Big Government as well as his interview with Andrew Breitbart on The Dennis Miller Show, the nationally syndicated radio program on Westwood One.

Mr. Haskell tells us he is sticking to his story.  “I’m not surprised, we expected this.  They are trying to discredit me without actually PROVING me wrong.  But, I’m not going to shut-up about this.“

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Jaw-dropping story in today’s Washington Post:

President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser on Sunday defended the administration’s decision to try in federal court the man charged with attempting to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day and indicated that he would be offered a plea agreement to persuade him to reveal what he knows about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with the failed attempt on the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight, was initially “talking to people who detained him” but now has a public defender and “doesn’t have to,” John O. Brennan said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We have different ways of obtaining information from individuals” in the criminal-justice process, Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “A lot of people . . . understand what they’re facing, and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, [and] we’re going to pursue that.” Brennan told CNN’s “State of the Union” that other terrorism suspects have “given us very valuable information as they’ve gone through the plea-agreement process.”

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In hockey, rough sport that it is, it is rare that one player scores three goals in one game.  They call that a Hat Trick.  In the game of politics, Obama now has managed the Liberal Hat Trick in the minds of the American Public.  In November, he may just find out how rough politics can be.

Of course, many people have known for a long time just how liberal Obama is and was.  There were many warning signs in the last election cycle.  The public however, in this slightly Right of Center nation, either was so tired of ineffective Republicans or, with the help of the Media, refused to acknowledge the warning signs.  In doing so they elected Obama with 52.9% of the vote – a victory but not an overwhelming victory.

Large margin or not, since being inaugurated, Obama has run quickly to the Left. In doing so, he fulfilled Reagan’s warning that Democrat Presidential candidates run as moderates but are determined to govern more to the Left, i.e. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.  The Obama Administration’s response to the terrorist bomb attempt in Detroit completed that process in the minds of the American public.

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Richard Nixon had advertising executive H.R. Haldeman; Ronald Reagan had image master Mike Deaver; Barack Obama has public relations guru David Axelrod.

(The Oval Office, December 29, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency.

I don’t know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.

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In a recent puff piece, The New York Times reports that our President is tired. This is not the first such report. Back in May, when he treated England’s Gordon Brown so shabbily, the excuse given — according to The Daily Telegraph – was that wrestling with the economic crisis had left Barack Obama too exhausted to be able to focus on foreign affairs.

We should perhaps discount what was said in May. For, as I have attempted to document in detail here, here, here, here, here, and here, President Obama is a gentleman, and, as such, he is never unintentionally rude. He is, in fact, a master of the insulting gesture, which he seems to reserve for political opponents, such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and for political leaders in countries, such as England, France, Germany, Israel, and Poland, which were closely associated with the United States prior to the Age of Obama.

This time, however, Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

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President Obama in on vacation in Hawaii all week…and most of next week.

Michigan Live is reporting a shocking claim by a passenger aboard Flight 253:

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.
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President Bill Clinton should be cut a lot of slack when it comes to 9/11. Sure the attack was planned under his watch, and sure President Clinton cowardly avoided taking custody of Osama bin Laden when Sudan offered him on a platter.

The truth of the matter is that prior to the 9/11 Jihad attack, there was no way in the world the American people would have stood for the large scale war that was necessary in order to fight this new kind of Jihad army.

Think about it this way, even after the Jihadis have murdered thousands upon thousands of people all around the world, including here in America on 9/11, the American Left still think it’s all America’s fault and that we deserved it, and therefore we have no legitimate right to fight back. Just image how much resistance there would have been toward going into Afghanistan prior to 9/11.

Add to the whack-o Left the fact that the Right would have accused Clinton of simply trying to distract attention away from his perjury case, and it should be obvious that Clinton didn’t have much political capital in reserve to convince the country that a preemptive war was necessary to avoid a large scale attack against an American city.

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From UK’s Telegraph:

Tough questions need to be asked of not just the US security agencies – such as the CIA and the FBI – but also of Britain’s MI6, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorist unit.

How can a Muslim student, whose name appears on a US law enforcement database, be granted a visa to travel to America, allegedly acquire an explosive device from Yemen, a country awash with al-Qaeda terrorists, and avoid detection from the world’s most sophisticated spy agencies?

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