The American Spectator is reporting that the Obama administration’s initial response to the security lapses revealed by the underwear bomber is to . . .  blame Bush. Rather than focusing all of its resources on rectifying the nation’s transportation security flaws, Obama’s political handlers are diverting precious administrative resources away from the war on terror to take on what they perceive as their real enemies - critics of the administration:

“The idea was that we’d show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could,” says a staffer in the counsel’s office. “We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we’d declassify it if necessary.”

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.

“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”

If this report is true, it would underscore several alarming tendencies that have emerged in the first year of the Obama administration:

• A Machiavellian/Alinskyite approach to executive governance that elevates raw politics over everything else. Faced with a public crisis of confidence in the transportation security infrastructure, team Obama’s first instincts are to go on offense against domestic political critics and to initiate a coordinated damage control campaign. Their lowest-common-denominator mentality appears to be, “no matter how bad things are, we just need to make sure that the public perceives our domestic political opponents to be even worse, because that’s how you win hotly contested political campaigns.” If, in the process, the public trust in the system ebbs even further, well that’s the short-term price we all have to pay to keep the “progressives” in charge. They rationalize that, in the long run, all Americans will be more be secure under a progressive regime.
• Team Obama does not consider international Islamic terrorism to be a grave threat to American national security.
• Team Obama frequently deflects responsibility and/or makes excuses for its policy failures.

 Update

Another reason team Obama might have initially responded to the underwear bomber incident by going on the offensive with a coordinated damage control campaign was that they knew administration staffers had personally botched some aspect of the pre-Christmas security planning. Newsweek is reporting that a White House advisor was briefed in October on the underwear bomb technique. And the British press is reporting that MI5 knew of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s extermist links. At this point, it is unclear whether any Obama administration officials did something (or failed to do something) that could have contributed to a potentially horrific security lapse; but if that did happen, it might help explain the administration’s behavior in the days following the incident.

Excellent editorial yesterday by Toby Harnden in the UK Telegraph, “Barack Obama is vulnerable on terror and he knows it.”   Harnden’s editorial, which touches on many similar themes as my post above, is yet another example of how the British mainsteam press is often doing a better job of covering and/or analyzing the Obama administration than is the American mainstream press.