No surprises

It was no surprise that political fallout was the focus of the attempted bombing over the weekend of an airliner that was landing in Detroit.

It’s Christmas. Most officialdom is elsewhere. President Obama was vacationing in Hawaii. Hey, there’s nothing like taking cheap shots at your opponent when he’s thousands of miles away.

Our favorite carbuncle, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., was on CNN almost it seems before passengers were herded off the Northwest Airlines Airbus that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up upon descent from a Amsterdam to Detroit flight. Abdulmutallab managed only to ignite a small fire and roast his chestnuts.

With no one else to answer their questions, the national media had the Republican noise machine handy to lay the blame. Yes, everything wrong is Obama’s fault 24-7 so why should this be any different?

That Abdulmutallab’s father, a wealthy retired Nigerian banking mogul, had supposedly warned the U.S. Embassy  that his son might be teetering over the edge into radical Islam is no doubt disturbing. And also unnerving is that the alleged screw-up bomber flew from Nigeria and Amsterdam to the U.S. while being on some kind of watch list.

But if one might remember, we’ve seen this all before and worse. Do you recall the so-called Shoe Bomber? Even worse what about people known by the FBI to have taken flight training just to take off and not land, and ended up murdering 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania? Oh mighty members of the right who want to lay all the blame on the Obama administration might recall but won’t say so that all of this happened during George W. Bush’s tenure.

Should the Obama administration have had some improvements made in airline security during the past year? One would hope so. However, when I last flew two months ago it was indicated I was on some kind of government security-threat list. I know this because I was unable to print my boarding pass online and was told as much by airline personnel. I wasn’t subjected to any strip search, however, and I was able to print my boarding pass on the return flight. And I have a very common name, for God’s sake.

So yes, the Obama administration deserves some blame. But so does George W. Bush. Probably so do many others. At least, thankfully, no more life has been yet lost due to these cowardly zealots. Before piling on the Obama administration, the flighty public should take a breath, read, and figure out what’s going on with everything before joining in with the angry crowd of right-wingers who have no other agenda than regaining power in Congress and the White House.