Obama’s elections and the promise of an American retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan is in part responsible for the marked rise in Al Qaeda efforts to attack the American homeland. Why? because it removed the single negative consequence of 9/11 as far as Jihadists are concerned, the insertion of infidel armies into two additional Muslim territories. The rest of the consequences of 9/11 are considered positive. America and the West incurred significant economic losses while the visibility and marked deference to Islam has increased geometrically.

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The time for muscular communitarianism has come. In his second year, President Obama best reveal that his communitarianism is not powerless, but indeed has muscles of its own, although these have so far been rarely exercised.

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The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

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Over on Planet Janet today, Homeland Security Secretary Janet “The system worked. No it didn’t!” Napolitano stepped in it again. Actually, she walked around it, but by walking around it, she stepped in it.

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The Palestinians – the supposedly less radical ones no less – have named a public square after a terrorist who killed nearly 40 people about 30 years ago.

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President Obama spoke to the American people, summarizing reports, which he’d ordered, focusing on how a terrorist boarded a plane on Christmas day and tried to blow it up, even though our government had been warned about him.

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    Who’d have thunk that California’s show-biz governator would turn out to have so much more common sense than the billionaire third term mayor of New York City.  Action-man Scharzenegger has proposed reducing the amount of money spent on prisons and re-directing it to the higher education system;  towards that end, he will campaign for a constitutional amendment that would prevent the prison budget from ever exceeding the amount allocated for universities.  By contrast, businessman Bloomberg, along with photophiliac Chuck Schumer, welcomed the notion of moving the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohamed to New York and only suggested that the federal government pick up the tab as an afterthought.  Estimates for security costs for the self-confessed terrorist initially hovered around 75 million dollars;  that sum has risen stratospherically in a month so that new estimates are well over 200 million a year for a trial that could easily take two years or more.  Just think of the recent trial of Brooke Astor’s son for the more benign crime of retargeting some of his dead stepfather’s money from the Metropolitan Museum and other temples of culture into the pocket of his own estate.  That proceeding invoved close to 100 witnesses and lasted six months for a matter that injured no one as much as those victimized jurors.

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Remember the 2008 attack on Mumbai? Yesterday, there was a repeat performance in Srinagar, Kashmir. The perpetrators were members of the Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar el Taiba. The attack focused on a midtown hotel, guests were turned to hostages and the city center was paralyzed.

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For eight years, the Left mercilessly slammed President Bush as the Master of Incompetence, on everything from the Iraq war to the response to Hurrican Katrina. They extended their attack to include what they termed Bush’s lack of awareness of his incompetence, symbolized by his shout-out to FEMA Director Michael Brown in the days after Katrina: “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

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President Barack Obama continues to prove the American left is immune to common sense whenever it conflicts with their “enlightened thinking.” Less than two weeks after a terrorist attack failed as a result of nothing more than dumb luck, our “post-modern” president has embraced another pillar of utterly irresponsible liberal dogma: a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal.

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So, what are we to make of the fact that in this story – and in nearly every mainstream media story about the Arab/Israeli conflict I’ve seen for the past decade – the fact that this airstrike was made in response to a strike into Israel by Hamas isn’t noted until near the end of the story?

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Yes, another case of Deja vu. The publication of a new volume of Einstein includes previously unpublished materials about his 1921 visit to America to raise money for his pet project, the establishment of my alma mater, Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Jewish public adored him but the Jewish (Harvard) elite did not. So writes Walter Issacson in the Dec. issue of the Atlantic. It includes these wonderful Einstein quotations:

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I knew this day would eventually come. I dreaded it, but I knew it would arrive someday. Today, I must admit that Hillary Clinton was right.

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Candidate Barack Obama challenged Americans to be audacious enough to hope that being perceived as racist bullies was at the root of all their security and economic woes, therefore, the best way forward was to elect as president a first term multiracial senator who would change the “unfair” free enterprise system. To worldwide cheers, the majority of American voters accepted the challenge. The greatest achievement of the Obama presidency has now been to prove candidate Obama’s security premise wrong, and to admit so in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

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This is the first business day of the new year.  By definition, the year will be momentous.

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GEN. HAYDEN: There are honest differences. Clearly, this past summer with regard to some CIA activity, interrogation memos from the office of legal counsel, the CIIG report, the question of a special prosecutor, I actually think that’s harmed our overall effort, all right? But that’s a personal view. That’s the decision the president has to make. We should not overly politicize things that are essentially security in nature. But we do need political guidance that will be the product of our political process.

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Five years after he drew some cartoons that included the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban, and that ignited a worldwide Muslim firestorm, Kurt Westergaard was attacked in his Denmark home by an angry Muslim, Associated Press reported.

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The “crazy boy,” as the late Egyptian President Sadat used to call him, argued sarcastically that al Qaeda has developed an unstoppable weapon: human transoceanic missiles. He meant by that Jihadists who were committed to istishaad (martyrdom) by blowing up commercial jets over targets in America.

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2009 was a heck of a year. Here are my five dramas, two surreal things and five of my preferred personal things.

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