reflectivepundit

President Obama One Year Later: No, We Can’t…

By Brigitte L. Nacos

What a difference a year makes! Twelve months ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans and people around the globe cheered as the first African-American in the history of the country became the 44^th President of the United States. Many believed in candidate and newly sworn in president Barack Obama’s message that change for the better would come under his stewardship; many believed in his assuring slogan, “Yes, We Can!” Whatever Obama promised in much detail during his amazing campaign, people were mostly uplifted by the hope, even conviction, that here was a new type of politician and leader with an agenda that was fundamentally different from George W. Bush and his disastrous policies.

Much changed during the last twelve months—but it was not the change that Obama promised and his supporters expected. Yesterday’s stunning victory of a Republican in Massachusetts’ race to fill Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate may have been in part the result of Democrat Martha Coakley’s flawed campaign and Republican Scott Brown’s clever pretension that he is an Independent. But the result was also a reflection of the popular perception that things are not going well in the country, especially with respect to the economy, and that nothing has changed in Washington’s politics as usual during the first year of Obama’s presidency. Just like the Republican victories in last fall’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Brown’s win in Massachusetts was decided by the growing middle of Independents, the very group that had contributed significantly to Obama’s victory in November 2008, and by disillusioned Democrats who either expressed their dissatisfaction by voting for Brown or did not bother to go to vote.

To a certain degree, Obama set himself up to fail. The expectations he fueled with his promise of change linked to a most ambitious agenda were impossible to satisfy nor was his somewhat naïve assurance of ending the era of partisan polarization.

Senator Reid has nothing to apologize for

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is amazing how the most bigotted right-wing pack has the nerve to attack Senator Reid and how he has been pressured into apologizing for a remark he made early in the 2008 campaign, namely, that then Senator Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

While strangely using the language of the past, in content this was a reasonable assessment by someone who has no problems with racial and ethnic differences but is fully aware of the realities of prejudice and bigotry and,yes, racism in society. 

Reid has a strong pro-civil rights record and was among the earliest supporters of Obama. What he expressed was simply the concern that America is far from post-racial. Look at elected and appointed African-American public officials and corporate successes and you will see that lighter-skinned minorities have the edge. Just think of trailblazers like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. This all is rooted deeply in the past.

Not Reid but the conservative elite and the populist dividers should be blamed. Instead, a media--including the allegedly liberal media--that crave controversy echo the right-wing’s accusations of Reid’s “controversial” statement and run with comparisons to Trent Lott’s past embarrassments. When Lott boasted his support for one-time presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, he seemed to indicated that a Thurmond presidency would have meant a different course of history—presumably a derailment of the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King's role.

Harvard law professor Lani Guinier is the only one who got it right, when she said according to the New York Times that Mr. Lott “seemed to be expressing nostalgia for the segregationist platform of Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, while Mr. Reid comments seemed to be addressing ‘an unfortunate truth about the present.’” Too bad that we do not see and hear Lani Guinier more in a media that give readily access to the practitioners of attack politics.

It is now clear that we do not have to wait for Sarah Palin to settle in at Fox News for a media removed from the fair and balanced label.

Rudy Giuliani’s Memory Lapses with 9/11, Shoe-Bomber and Anthrax Attack on City Hall

By Brigitte L. Nacos

“What he [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush.”

                                          Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

 

After Rudy Giuliani got away with the incredible statement that no domestic terrorism occurred on President Bush’s watch when he was interviewed on Good Morning America by GeorgeStephanopoulos of ABC News Friday morning, his problem with reality and truth was thankfully exposed right away by several on-line watchdogs. How in heaven could a man whose claim to fame beyond New York City is tied to the 9/11 attacks “forget” the date of the worst terrorist nightmare on American soil? 

But this was not the only “memory lapse” in the service of political and partisan expediency. The night before he told Larry King that the  case of the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid took place before 9/11 as an explanation why then President Bush did not mention the incident until six days after the failed attack. The fact is that the shoe bomber incident occurred on December 22, 2001—more than three months after 9/11.

One would expect that a man who built a lucrative business on the assumption that he is an expert on terrorism and its consequences would have the most basic facts and dates right. Instead, he actually spins stories of fact and fiction.

During his conversation with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Friday afternoon Giuliani claimed to have misspoken in his appearance on Good Morning America. But when Blitzer mentioned the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, Giuliani added another piece of fiction, when he said:

“Gee, Wolf, it not only happened, there was -- there was anthrax found in the office right next to mine. There was attack {sic] on city hall [emphasis added] as well as on the major networks and Governor Pataki's office. I mean, I as directly involved in that.”

But there was no anthrax attack on New York’s city hall at the time. Instead, a letter that was sent by NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw to Giuliani’s chief-of-staff Anthony V. Carbonetti contained some anthrax spores—seemingly coming from an anthrax letter addressed to Brokaw weeks earlier. 

The Terrorist Threat and Homeland Insecurity

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In a clear-eyed, book-length assessment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policy one of the foremost security experts, Stephen Flynn, wrote a few years ago, “What was initially advertised as a two-front effort quickly became a lopsided strategy in which protecting our homeland has been neglected while the vast majority of our resources and political capital have been expanded in ‘taking the battle to the enemy.’” But the idea of fighting terrorists abroad so that they cannot hit us at home was flawed from the start. Flynn was right in the past and he is right today, when he concluded, “Despite all the rhetoric since September 11, 2001, and some new federal spending on homeland security, America remains unprepared to prevent and respond to acts of catastrophic terrorism on U.S. soil.”

In short, what the state of affairs through G.W. Bush’s presidency was—and is now—comes down to homeland insecurity rather than security. Former Vice President Dick Cheney can boast all he wants that on his watch no further attacks in the homeland occurred after 9/11, but the frightening growth of the global leaderless jihad was fueled during and by America’s so-called “war against terrorism.” The record number of foiled attacks by home-grown jihadis in 2009, the bloody strike by an Army doctor at Fort Hood last November, and the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day proved Stephen Flynn’s prediction right, namely, that in spite of the wars we fight abroad, “terrorists can still come here—and, worse yet, are being made here.”

While the Obama administration inherited this flawed counterterrorism policy, it is now high time for the president to recognize that he cannot follow the same path as his predecessor. Not at home and not abroad. Today’s meeting with members of the National Security Council must be the mere prelude to a comprehensive reassessment of homeland security and the adoption of more realistic and more effective policy priorities.

To be sure, the immediate focus will be on the multiple mistakes made by security agencies and personnel in Washington and abroad in the case of the would-be underwear bomber I wrote about earlier. We know now that the British government did share the name of the young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the with U.S. agencies after they denied him entrance into the United Kingdom. Another clue that was missed by the intelligence community! Intelligence about the Fort Hood shooter, too, was not acted upon.

Obviously, the creation of the office of a director of national security and the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, both charged with coordinating intelligence for the sake of effective counterterrorism, did not overcome the traditional lack of intelligence-sharing by and the turf fights between the multitude of intelligence agencies. This must change. And it must change now.