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Jewish World Review
April 29, 2009
/ 5 Iyar 5769
Something in the air
By
Jack Kelly
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Little better illustrates that this administration has pretty much
forgotten what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, than the idiotic publicity
stunt it attempted in New York City Monday.
Someone at the White House — Louis Caldera, director of the White House
Military Office, has accepted responsibility — thought it would be a
swell idea to get a publicity photo of Air Force One flying low around
the Statue of Liberty. The New York City police, and the guy in the
mayor's office who authorizes street fairs were informed of this, but
were ordered to keep mum about it.
It's bizarre enough that an administration which thinks nothing of
making public explicit details of CIA interrogation techniques would
deem it necessary to keep this publicity stunt secret. It's more
bizarre that it occurred to no one that the sight of a 747 flying low
and close, apparently being pursued by an F-16 fighter, might be
unnerving to people who work in high rise buildings in lower Manhattan.
"Fearing the worst, thousands of people streamed out of the skyscrapers
and into the streets," reported the Wall Street Journal.
"I would call this felony stupidity," Fran Townsend, who the White House
adviser on homeland security during the Bush administration, told CNN
Tuesday.
Mr. Caldera — who was a member of the California legislature before
President Clinton picked him to be Secretary of the Army in 1998 — is
quite stupid enough to have made this blunder on his own. He was vice
chancellor of the California State University system from 2003 to 2006,
a time when its academic standards were plunging. He served on the
board of IndyMac bank — one of the worst offenders in the subprime
mortgage crisis, from 2002 until the bank's seizure by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. in July 2008. But while I would be very
surprised if the president were aware in advance of this publicity
stunt, I also doubt that the buck stopped with Mr. Caldera.
But if the decision were Mr. Caldera's alone, it's hard to disagree with
Ms. Townsend that: "this office is too important to have somebody who
doesn't have the judgment to understand the impact of this."
The response of New Yorkers should remind the White House Americans are
not as complacent as the Obama team apparently is about the prospect of
another terror attack. A Gallup poll released Monday indicated 55
percent of Americans think the use of harsh interrogation techniques was
justified, with only 36 percent saying they were not. This suggests it
would be politically unwise for the administration to pursue show trials
of the Justice department lawyers who said those techniques were legal.
No lasting harm has been done by Mr. Caldera's blunder, if indeed the
boo boo was his alone. There could be consequences to the
administration's tepid response to the swine flu epidemic.
The epidemic apparently caught the Obama administration by surprise.
"U.S. public health officials did not know about a growing outbreak of
swine flu in Mexico until nearly a week after that country started
invoking protective measures, and didn't learn that the deaths were
caused by a rare strain of the influenza until after Canadian officials
did," the Washington Post reported.
This is perhaps because the top 19 jobs in the department of Health and
Human Services are vacant. The Center for Disease Control has an acting
director, Richard Besser, but he's an expert on terrorism, not
infectious diseases.
European and Asian governments are carefully screening all persons
entering from Mexico, but in the U.S., it's business as usual. Ann
Curry of NBC's Today show Tuesday asked Janet Napolitano, head of the
Department of Homeland Security, "Why is it not smart to do more to
prevent new cases from arriving from Mexico?"
"That's something that always can be considered," Ms. Napolitano said,
"but you have to look at what the costs are. We have literally
thousands of trucks and lots of commerce that cross that border."
If the epidemic spreads, Ms. Napolitano may come to regret her
passivity. But so, too, will thousands of Americans.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
Jack Kelly Archives
© 2009, Jack Kelly
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