Katie Couric will be airing, every Wednesday, a single question and answer from both candidates. Here is Barack Obama’s answer to why no attacks have occurred in the U.S. since 9/11:

Well … I think that the initial invasion into Afghanistan disrupted al Qaeda. And that was the right thing to do. I mean, we had to knock out those safe havens. And that, I think, weakened them. We did some work in strengthening our homeland security apparatus here. Obviously, the average person knows that when they go to the airport, because they are goin’ through taking off their shoes … all that. The problem is when we got distracted by Iraq. We gave al Qaeda time to reconstitute itself. And we now know, based on all the intelligence available to us that they, in fact, have set up safe havens back in Afghanistan, the hills between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are now carrying out very aggressive actions against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and they are training to attack the United States once again. So now, my hope obviously is that we continue to prevent them from being able to move at all out of those safe havens. But our intelligence indicates … that the danger, the likelihood, of a potential attack is significantly higher now. And that has been an enormous mistake that I intend to correct when I’m president of the United States.

What a perfectly horrid response. He told us how we’ve messed up (in his eyes) yet the question was why has it worked. Does he not know or is he such an embittered partisan that he can’t admit the one aspect of the Bush legacy–no further attacks on America soil–which is beyond dispute.

This puts Obama (as he was in denying the success of the surge) back in the role of denying reality. Moreover, he reiterates the “distracted in Iraq” line, which ignores the very real damage we did to Al Qaeda there. We weakened Al Qaeda only in Afghanistan but not in Iraq? Huh?

Moreover, is there no credit due to the armed forces, the national security team–even customs inspectors? One comes away with the impression that Obama has not a clue as to what has or what will keep us safe. The McCain people better hope he repeats that answer next week.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 1:39 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.