Wait, I thought criticizing your president in a time of war is unpatriotic and giving comfort to the enemy.

I guess that rule doesn't apply if your president is teh brown.

Pete Hoekstra - STFU! -Kevo

Everything you said is true, but you neglected to mention he is likely just to be voicing an opinion already held by about half the country.

The depths of Republican depravity, hypocrisy and irrelevance shall be best exhibited by the Republican response to Hoekstra's ridiculous behavior.

CRICKETS

... you neglected to mention he is likely just to be voicing an opinion already held by about half the country.

Way off. 10%.

But I will grant you half the big mouths in the country.

The appropriate follow up question would have been: "Rep. Hoekstra, would it be fair to blame the Bush adminstration for 9/11?"

Obama needs to make some Republicans in Washington fear him, and fast -- Hoekstra's scalp will do for a start.

This is the man for whom the term "too dumb to play dead in a cowboy movie" was intended for.

That said, some genius commenter at a right-wing website noted that Mr. Hoekstra is from Holland -- as in the city of Holland, Michigan -- and wondered what the connection was between him and the Netherlands.

The level of hatred among Obama's opponents exceeds the love of any of them for their country. They should all be ashamed but the elected officials should be doubly ashamed.

Well, OK, but, bear in mind Pants-on-Fire-Guy (no! not Hoekstra, I mean the terrorist!) was a person known to the authorities, he got through the lines anyway, and if he'd been smarter in his choice of weapon he might well have taken down the plane. That is to say, PoFG's failure was his own, not due to smart anti-terrorism by the Obama administration.

I say this because you're acting as if this is some kind of evidence that the Obama administration's policies are somehow vindicated by PoFG. In reality, the domestic, law enforcement side, policies seem to be little different to the Bush administration's. We still have the same stupid rules about liquids and nail clippers, the same badly managed "terrorist watchlist", and the policy remains as pointless today as it did when it was first enacted. Obama's real strengths, and where there are differences between him and Bush, cannot be measured by "attempts to blow up planes" less than a year after he's taken office.

Hoekstra's an idiot and a fraud, not because he's saying PoFG is evidence that Obama's terrorism policies aren't working, but because the part he's objecting to, that failed during Christmas, that allowed PoFG to get onto a plane, are the ones he's always supported, that he's advocating expanding. No, he doesn't have a right to criticize something he supported when the other guy was doing it.

This week's Sunday show line-up:

"Is Obama responsible for the Nigerian Attack?"

"Would the Nigerian attack have occurred under Bush?"

"Is the danger from Al Qaeda growing under Obama?"

and on Fox:

"Can we survive four years of an Obama administration?"

Remember, we don't pick a side, we just ask the questions!

Obama is certainly responsible for creating more terrorists: Since taking office Obama has killed dozens of children (most recently 23 in Yemen) and other civilians, with his assassinations by drones.

I know, it doesn't seem like much when you consider the 400,000 Iraqi children killed by sanctions (under Clinton)after Bush 1 destroyed their water and sewage facilities. Or the thousands killed, and millions displaced from their homes, by Bush 2. But Obama is just getting started.

And now Lieberman is arguing, as will others, that we should make war on Yemen. He doesn't say whether he thinks we should do that before or after we make war on Iran. Meanwhile Israel, America's greatest friend in the Middle East, continues to use weapons and money supplied by the USA to kill Palestinians and expand it's illegal settlements-what some call a slow genocide.

Of course we continue with our secret prisons and torture while condemning others who do the same thing.

We are an empire in decline. And we deserve to be.

Napalitano is out calling a failed detonator mission accomplished and Obama is playing golf, but the country is in good hands!

sven's comment is dead on point. How come the Democrats are in power, but the Republicans have total control of darn near every mass communications outlet?

yes, zzzzzzz, you're absolutely right. the president should be manning a security checkpoint at some airport in his spare time....

Yes since Bush was given a pass on 9/11, as Dana Perino recently noted no terrorist attacks happened on his watch, I assume the GOP would also extend to Obama a similar courtesy if god forbid there were a successful attack... Yes I know, very funny. Anyone who expects any sort of intellectual or moral consistency from Republicans clearly has not learned a thing from recent history...

Republicans own the hysteria.

Whiny baby syndrome,

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2177137

Does it matter to the knee-jerk blame Obama crowd that this guy boarded the plane in another country and was processed through that country's security?

Should he have been re-screened when he changed planes in Europe?

What could the FBI or DHS have done differently to prevent this person from boarding a plane in Lagos?

yes, zzzzzzz, you're absolutely right. the president should be manning a security checkpoint at some airport in his spare time....

Or changing zzzz's Depends every time he shrieks in panic and pisses himself.

This guy was already on a watch list. Despite this, US security (which reports into Obama) allowed him onto a flight into the US. With explosives about his person.

That's a massive fail, and ultimate responsibility for that failure lies with Obama.

Hoekstra is right, and no amount of name-calling from power-worshipping, bootlicking bloggers will change that.

"But some are critical of the Obama adminstration"............. is all that will be spread around by the national media. There will likely be no real analysis of the complexities surrounding this situation.

It is practically a given.

If Obama were serious about the war on terror, he would have invaded the Netherlands by now.

Despite this, US security (which reports into Obama) allowed him onto a flight into the US.

So "US security" runs the airport in Lagos?

That's a massive fail, and ultimate responsibility for that failure lies with Obama.

Uh, no. The immediate responsibility for not catching the explosives is borne by airport security in Lagos and Amsterdam -- not Obama.
If you're going to make the case for ultimate responsibility then it lies with DHS and TSA policies put in place by Bush. And the only way an attack like this could have been stopped is by full strip searches of every passenger at every airport in the world prior to boarding. How do you think that's going to fly, genius?

This is not 9/11. There weren't months of warnings from domestic and foreign intelligence agencies that were casually ignored by the Bush administration, this wasn't a plot by an international criminal organization that had been in the works for years. This was an impetuous move by a friggin' nutball, known as a laughingstock street preacher among his classmates and whose own family warned had gone completely off the reservation a few weeks back. In terms of criminal taxonomy, this guy has way more in common with the Holocaust museum shooter than Zacharias Moussaoui.

I knew I remembered something from when I was a kid...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629

No-one blamed Eisenhower (nor should they have).
They didn't stop selling in-flight life insurance at airports.
They didn't start inspecting bags.
They caught the guy, tried him and executed him, and kept proceeding on the assumption that individuals wacko enough to blow up an aircraft full of people made up an infinitesimally small segment of the population. Which was true then, and is true now.

Under the pants-wetter's logic, no-one should drive anymore in the US. After all, 40,000 people are killed every year in auto accidents. How many, exactly, died in terrorist attacks on airplanes in the US in the last year? How many?

Mustang Bobby, @ 12:21,

Not only is Hoekstra from Holland (Michigan) but the name Hoekstra is a Dutch name; that's *two* strikes against him. I think he's just trying to misdirect our attention from the weak security in Amsterdam. Though I don't understand why he would want to cover up for the weak security in Lagos. Perhaps he's got a deal with some Nigerians, for the unclaimed money in the bank..

Regarding the criticism Republicans and the Bush Administration--a letter I saw to a local newspaper from an observer with critical thinking skills follows below in quotes>>>
so, regarding those calling President Obama ineffective on security--let's look back at Bush/Cheney's administration:

"Has Barack Obama ignored security briefings with titles such as "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," thus failing to do anything to prevent the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,800 Americans?

"Has he cherry picked intelligence to build a phony case for invading another country that posed no risk to us, leading to the senseless deaths of over 4,300 American soldiers?"

"Has he ignored federal plans, like the "Hurricane Pam" exercise, designed to minimize the impact of a hurricane in New Orleans, thereby contributing to the loss of 1,000 residents along the Gulf Coast?"

"Add it up, and more than 8,000 Americans have died as a direct result
of the negligent and incompetent policies of George W. Bush..."

If only we had a REAL American for a president, this deadly attack would not have succeeded!

Oh, wait.

Obama didn't say we would deny that terrorism exists, only that our conflict with Islamic extremism would no longer be called a "war" on terrorism. That is because a "war" on an undefined enemy had been used as a pretext to justify unilateral preventative attacks by the US on any country we deemed fit, as well as a justification by the radical right to justify its long-standing aim of concentrating power in the chief executive at the expense of Congress and the rule of law.

Retiring the war on terror as a lable had nothing to do with diminishing the seriousness with which Obama took the real threat of terrorism, only its exploitation by the Radical Right for its own selfish purposes, which Hoekstra's rank opportunism here to score a few cheap political points is a perfect example.

The GOP really shouldn't go there and try to play this game. If Obama "owns" this attempted terrorist attack then Bush "owns" 9/11. End of story.

We need (in the English language) a single word that will stop this nonsense in its tracks.

In the Russian language, they have "Nekulturny." It's an answer/indictment that says "You are uncultured; without thought; not worthy of an educated person's attention," all with one word.

Let's get us one of those...

Followup; this comes to mind:

"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."

-- Oscar Wilde

We need (in the English language) a single word that will stop this nonsense in its tracks.

In the Russian language, they have "Nekulturny." It's an answer/indictment that says "You are uncultured; without thought; not worthy of an educated person's attention," all with one word.

Let's get us one of those...

I find the the English word, "knuckle-head", suffices for my needs. I'll grant you that as a compound word, it is not as neat as the Russian. However, I recommend it to anyone at a loss for describing the likes of Hoekstra.

I say we adopt the Russian word "Nekulturny" and use it everytime in respose to the lies past off by the GnOP and their followers (teabaggers). Off to other sites to spread the "word". Thank you Churchyard.

Ninny , nincompoop , harebrained , and buffoon are a mile wide and a nit wit deep .

I'll bet that Hoekstra was about to pee in his pants from unadulterated fear during this interview. Fear that President Obama decided NOT to issue an unecessary terror alert and upset millions of Americans for NO reason.

Pete's so right, after all, we know to be taking it seriously - the President has to ignore CIA briefings about "Determined to Attack", go on vacation to chop brush, and tell the CIA briefer "he's covered his ass" after they warn him AGAIN, and then freeze on camera for seven minutes reading a fucking upside down book during the attack - that's the GOLD STANDARD for Presidents being SERIOUS about TERRORISM!

Don't mean to nitpick, Glen, but that's spelled "Terrrrism."

Churchyard; I was always fond of "douchebag" or just plain "ass"?
Hoekstra is plenty of either take your pick.

---------
W is 100% responsible for 9/11, & the fallout from Rita, Katrina, etc...
---------
As my dad always says: "GOP=me, DEMS=we"

These selfish, corrupt, brain dead, hypocratic a-holes need to be put completely out to pasture in the next election cycle.

During the near non-stop cascade of incompetence that was the Bush years, it got so I couldn't say his name without appending, "the idiot"; as in "George Bush, the idiot".

Pete Hoekstra is from pretty much the same intellectual trailer park.

Squiggleslash @ 12:45 PM raises some very good points. Once we allow ourselves to see the situation as something other than Bush vs. Obama, I suggest seeing this episode for what it is and try to analyze some questions, not about the people because none of them want terrorist actions to "work". Questions like:

1. Why is it, under whatever administration, that a person associated with terrorists and whose own father reportedly had reported the nutball as a danger to the US is not on the highest step of the "watch" ladder? How Is he cleared to fly on an American commercial plane that carries Americans to an American destination?

2. Why is it that persons flying into the US are able to conceal explosives on their body when they would not be allowed to carry a shampoo bottle onto the plane? Is there no equipment and process to detect that? If not, is it being developed?

3. What can we learn about Janet Napolitano by virtue of her saying "the system worked"? At best, she is tone deaf. At worst, a denier of the obvious. I lost some confidence in her, not because the incident happened but because of that statement. Does a competent person, who has a full appreciation for what people consider to be "the system", the whole world wide interwoven system, think?

Those are 3 entirely legit questions, apolitical in nature. They need to be raised in a candid way.

Terry Ott,

You ask three very good questions. Hopefully somebody in the White House is asking the same questions. My guess is that the answewrs have something to do with the monsterous bloat at the DHS.

i've just watched as chuck todd adopts the talking points of hoekstra and mainstreams that lunatic's rantings.

staggering irresponsibility.

Yes, the man is a blooming idiot. As someone who he supposedly "represents" in Congress, the only upside of his running for governor is that he might lose his seat. Please please please. Just considering his abuse of twitter to notify everyone, including any interested terrorist cells, about a congressional visit to Iraq, he really shouldn't be on the intelligence committee. His desire to immediately go to the media with any briefing material he receives (even classified) is disgusting.

Thank you, Peter Hoekstra, for tacitly admitting that you believe George W. Bush and the Dick were responsible for 9/11.

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