Northwest bomb plot: Better to keep Obama quiet?

posted at 1:33 pm on December 27, 2009 by Karl
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NRO’s Jim Geraghty faults Pres. Obama’s silence in the wake of the thwarted attempted terror bombing of Northwest flight 253 over Detroit:

At some point, a strategy insisting that unsuccessful attacks are not worth presidential comment starts looking like whistling past the graveyard, or pretending that the incidents aren’t a big deal when they are.

Geraghty linked The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, who suggested the silence is a strategy designed to avoid giving Fahrenheit 9/11-esque fodder to his critics.

Ambinder may have a point. Had the entire administration been able to remain silent, its supporters would have found (as non-supporter Patrick Ruffini did) that Pres. George W. Bush did not make a statement after Richard Reid’s thwarted shoe-bombing in 2001. Indeed, lefties could have reverted to blaming the Bush administration for not plugging known security holes in the system.

But the entire Obama administration did not have the luxury of remaining silent. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s comment that “the system worked” not only blunts any attempt to blame the Bush administration, but is so at variance with the facts that it will promote the idea that the administration’s terrorism policy is based on magical thinking.

Indeed, as Erick Erickson points out, the failed attack on Northwest flight 253 was attempted by a man of wealth, privilege and education — directly contrary to Pres. Obama’s rhetoric that terrorism is spawned by poverty and ignorance. That is as good a reason as any for Obama to stay mum about the failed attack. As Mark Twain once observed, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

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