NP: MGMT, Time To Pretend (EP)

Like anyone else who reads lots of blogs, I've been seeing lots and lots about the "crotch bomber," who failed to bring down a plane on Christmas Day, in the past week. And as such, I've seen a whole bunch of links to Spencer Ackerman's assessment that this was not, as the President declared, a "systemic failure." Note that this is very, very different from saying that the system worked -- which, in itself, is something that was never actually said by Janet Napolitano about the attempt itself.

Anyway, back to the "system" itself. It's one of those slightly perverse conclusions that comes out of academic pursuits -- like economists who tell us the "optimal" number of plane crashes in a given year is a number greater than zero -- but a failed terrorist attack is one of the best possible outcomes if you're in the business of preventing terrorist attacks. The reason is borne out in this convenient, hindsight-driven notion that "we should have seen it coming." Yes, there were dots to be connected. And obviously, the system didn't see it coming, but now we have actual data on an actual event that can be used to further train that system. And no, I don't mean that in the sense that we'll have to now remove our underpants at the airport.

This is one of the reasons, to me, that Dick Cheney's bile-spewing is so ridiculously misguided. This was Cheney's system that didn't catch this guy. The Department of Homeland Security was ostensibly set up to help facilitate communication between intelligence agencies who weren't sharing their data effectively, and if they're still not doing that right, he should welcome the opportunity to make that system better.

The rest of the right-wing response has gotten so predictable as to be a joke. I honestly started to lose the ability to tell the difference between actual right-wing criticisms of the President and the administration and parodies of those criticisms. Part of this is the same thing that always bothers me about the talk-radio and 24-hour news network culture, in that these politicians and pundits are counting on viewers and listeners to completely ignore the past in favor of whatever they're yelling about right now. This is as close to an apples-to-apples comparison you're going to get between Bush and Obama on dealing with this kind of threat, but if you live in if you're in the Fox News bubble, you're almost certainly not going to hear that mentioned at all.

Which isn't to say that the current administration couldn't have done better, and there are real lessons to be learned here -- was Abdulmutallab placed on the right list based on the available intelligence? Is the mapping of lists to airport security actions appropriate? Would more millimeter-wave scanners make a difference? If these questions get drowned out by calls to fire Janet Napolitano because she didn't seem concerned enough on TV, then I have to wonder who it is making us less safe. That this has been proffered as an actual argument from an actual GOP congressman speaks volumes about the substance of the criticism to me.