Funny, I’ve heard the exact same sentiment from liberals - liberals see various evils as the enemy: hunger, sickness, disease, racism, what have you - and that conservatives see liberalism itself as the enemy (e.g., “Liberalism is a mental disease!” bumper stickers). You’re more alike than you care to admit, using the same exact arguments, except on the flip side of the mirror.

No, Obama is not incompetent. Just muddle-headed. He can’t seem to figure out where political calculation ends and his job protecting Americans begins.

WTF, Rick? In what way does your very description of Obama not qualify as incompetent?

They profile people. Not just by race, color or nationality although that is part of the equasion but many other factors such as the things missed on this latest farce.

You know, a single traveler, paid for his ticket with cash, just before the flight was scheduled. On two lists, The country he originated the flight in, missing documents and last but not least the fact that he had no baggage at all.

In Israel this guy would have been taken to a back room and strip searched and arrested just from those facts above.

NO problem in peace prize country, just wave him through on to the jetliner headed to America.

OH…and their would have been no backlash of “profiling” or “racism” in Israel either.

Americans are their own worse enemies, we search for “bad stuff”, and crow over the fact that we make you take your shoes off and empty your pockets. Thats OK, no problem with that but what about the old lady or man from florida on vacation? Well, they get the same if not more hassle than the black guy from Detroit with the last name of Mohammad.

Idiots led by idiots.

Papa Ray

Since 2001, there have been over 14,000 attacks by Muslims world-wide. No one knows the exact numbers of men, women and children who have been slaughtered but it continues to rise. Maybe they are our Darwinian population control agents?

To John Burke, I would say that the US will be less safe under this President than any who have come before him. With the ill-considered move of the Gitmo prisoners to Thomson, IL, we will have Lone Ranger jihadists coming out of the woodwork. They don’t have to be imported, either. In fact, I live a few miles from one of their Jamaat ul Fuqra compounds and it’s well-stocked with arms.

There are about 30 of these American citizen ex-felon jihadist compounds in the US, perhaps more. Given the restraints on domestic intel collection, civilians can actually gather more information than the pros. Thus, there have been flyovers of these camps which have provided evidence of their firepower and training grounds. The women, btw, live in abject poverty on welfare (a third of which is sent to Sheikh Jilani in Pakistan. Jilani is implicated in Daniel Pearl’s death). Local authorities are afraid of these camps though the various state police aren’t as intimidated.

The circus trial in NYC will be a magnet for homicidal maniac jihadists who love death and want to share it. Eric Holder has made a huge tactical error here if he wanted to see Obama serve a second term. That trial will still be going on in 2011 and people are going to be fed up with it and with those who made the decision to turn a military matter into a civil one.

This year, I expect the tempo to pick up on domestic terror and the number of “isolated incidents” to increase. Every time Obama utters that term, I can only picture an ostrich with his head…in the sand.

Last time around we had a cowboy for our president. This time we have Hamlet, only his dramaturgy bears no relation to Shakespeare. This is more like “The Bald Soprano” of post WW II.

Meanwhile, the executive branch and the legislative branch are in a race to see who can make us a third world economy the quickest. Ugh.

Happy New Year, Rick.

Of course, this is a preposterous standard for making national security policies. Arguably, the brief period of peak Soviet military power was the ONLY time in US history when our very existence might have been at risk (and even then, once a balance of political and military power was reached after 1962, the “existential threat” appeared to many to be increasingly hypothetical, enabling many to make the argument that Americans suffered from an inordinate fear of Communism).

In any case, throughout much of my adult life — the Cold War notwithstanding — I felt no uneasiness about travelling anywhere in the world. I worked for many years in the World Trade Center and naturally thought nothing of it. By and large, except for a few hot spots abroad where local conflicts were under way and for ordinary crime at home, Americans could feel safe and secure.

No more — and we’re certainly not the only ones. Various Islamic extremists have murdered hundreds of other Muslims in just the past month. Meanwhile, an AQ affiliate came perilously close to blowing 288 innocent Americans to pieces. A short while ago, a home-grown terrorist murdered 13 people at Fort Hood. Just before that, the FBI broke up a plot centered around an Afghan living in New York that has been described as the most serious terror operation disrupted inside the US since 2001. Overall, there have been 29 Islamic terrorist plots targering the US since 911 — and worse, hundreds of successful attacks and foiled plots across the world, dozens of which targeted Americans or US interests (not counting attacks on US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan).

It seems almost ridiculous to have to work to persuade anyone that this is an extremely serious, ongoing threat. In fact, Americans’ lives are far more in direct jeopardy than they were during the period of the “existential” threat from Soviet nukes.

What exactly to do about this is open to reasonable debate. But when you begin by attempting to downplay or wish away the seriousness of today’s threat or to trash others for fearmongering, whatever else you have to say is not persuasive.

Reynolds and all those of his mindset should be taking the failed Christmas attack as a challenge to their assumptions, rather than using it as another opportunity to do battle with domestic political rivals. Had Abdulmutallab succeeded in his mission, let’s face it, there would be hell to pay for Obama and the Democrats. Plans to close Gitmo would screech to a halt. KSM would be redirected back to a Military Commission. The no-fly list would grow exponentially whatever the ACLU did. Our courts would reflexively pull back from their trend toward expanding detainee due process. And CIA would get a big budget increase.

Learn from this lesson.

You began this thread by stating that ALL right wingers need an enemy, need reassurance, like to spread fear, blah, blah. You are able to deduce that because you are an expert on everything, but especially on how other people think and feel. You’re even an expert on what gives right wingers a boner. But when someone points the generalizations back at you, then you get apoplectic.

You complain about name calling, but if anyone expresses a different viewpoint than Michael Reynolds, they are completely ignorant.

You give the GWB administration ZERO credit for its foreign policy successes, even though you keep trumpeting BO’s predator strike policy in AFG/PAK, even though it’s a continuation of GWB policy, like many of BO’s policies. The best part is when you write, “So frankly I don’t really have much interest in chest-thumping Right wingers who know nothing of the history involved, nothing of the countries involved, or the issues involved, but reduce everything to some imbecilic assumption that conservatives are always right on defense and foreign policy.” Do you realize, Michael, that you were talking about YOURSELF in that comment? Come on, take a good long look in the mirror. If you’re capable of being even 10 percent honest with yourself, I promise you’ll feel better.

I’m done chatting with you. Normally, I enjoy debating with ideological opponents, but you are so unpleasant and pompous that you take all the fun out of it.

You display the modern conservative mind: historically ignorant, illogical, and full of chocolate pudding.

Oh yeah? Well, I’m rubber and you’re glue…whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

Your misreading of my comment is staggering.