Mark Halperin: Obama could sure use another 9-11 [Reader Post]

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Or another, bigger Oklahoma City.

So says Mark Halperin

The astonishment is palpable in Byron York’s column:

Everyone knows Barack Obama is in a political fix. The coalition that elected him in 2008 has collapsed, and the independents whose support lifted him to the White House have now abandoned him. What to do?

York notes that any effort by Obama to compromise with Republicans will be met by scorn from Obama’s base, and compromise is antithetical to Obama’s core in any case.

What Obama really needs, Halperin says, is a stroke of good luck. “Busy as he’s been, he has not yet experienced a single major moment that has benefited him politically,” Halperin writes. Events like the Gulf oil spill have been harmful, rather than helpful. So what would brighten Obama’s political prospects? Here’s Halperin:

No one wants the country to suffer another catastrophe. But when a struggling Bill Clinton was faced with the Oklahoma City bombing and a floundering George W. Bush was confronted by 9/11, they found their voices and a route to political revival.

So there. Obama needs an American disaster. Anything with a considerable loss of life will suffice. Desperation often causes awkward situations:

Maybe a bin Laden capture or Iranian revolution would help, although it seems highly unlikely that a dramatic technological innovation would revitalize American manufacturing in time for Obama to be re-elected in 2012. But the fact is, presidents have often shown their true mettle in the face of tragic circumstances. And Obama’s partisans appear to be coming very close to hoping for a tragedy to revive the president’s political fortunes.

That’s no exaggeration. Halperin makes it sound as though the Obama Presidency depends on catastrophe.

While he negotiates his way through the lame-duck session of Congress, prepares for his State of the Union address and budget, and braces for the new normals of 2011, the President had better figure out how to react when the moment comes. Without that moment — whatever it is — and strong leadership in its wake, Obama may find his luck has run out.

It’s a curious moment in history when an American President needs a multitide of Americans to die in order to save his own political future. If many Americans die, it would be good luck for Obama. What sort of person even permits himself the luxury of this kind of fantasy?

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Your post is excellent.
It calls to mind Obama’s own words to Bob Woodward.

We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever … we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

What rot!

We lost billions of dollars that day.
We were set back economically for a couple of years.
We will never get those poor people back who either died in the collapses, plane crashes, explosions or who fell to their deaths holding hands because the smoke and heat from the fire was going to kill them anyway.
Obama must not try to remember those folks.
He certainly doesn’t put himself in their shoes.
The vast majority of those murdered that day had no idea who did it or why.
We do know.

But Obama does all he can to lull us into unawareness.
While I don’t agree that we ”need” another 9-11, I am afraid it is looking very likely we will have another successful attack.
We can’t be catching them all.
Caught another this week…….
“FBI ‘Facebook sting’ nets US man in car bomb case,” AFP,

FBI agents arrested a young American Wednesday who believed he was about to set off a car bomb at a US military recruitment office, the Department of Justice said.

Special agents used Facebook to nab the young man, 21, whom they said dreamed of jihad, plotted to carry out a personal strike against US forces — and then refused repeatedly to change course.

Officials said the bomb he wanted to use, however, was a government-supplied fake.

Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, was arrested early Wednesday “after he attempted to remotely detonate what he believed to be explosives in a vehicle parked in the Armed Forces recruiting station parking lot,” US Attorney Rod Rosenstein said.
……

He had his test, the oil leak, and failed! Did I ever miss Bush and Cheney then!

You had better pray to what ever God suits you, that something on the scale of 9-11 NEVER happens on his watch.

He would use the occasion to further restrict OUR liberty instead of going after the responsible parties and profuse apologies to them for what we did to cause them to act in this way would follow.

Mark my words.

It’s time to lock these marxist loonies in a camp some where b4 they hurt somebody 😀

I don’t think he’d react to an attack that cost an enemy $500,000 to mount by launching two inconclusive overseas wars that have pushed the resulting financial damages to the United States up to over $1 trillion–and counting.

It’s astonishing that a lot of people still don’t seem to grasp what it is that makes terrorism so effective a weapon. It doesn’t actually make much sense to mobilize vast armies to exterminate a few rats.

There’s an old truth in military strategy that once the first battle is engaged in all plans must be open to readjustment. (I’m sure somebody said that better, but I don’t remember who.)

Point is, we cannot know if, say, starting a war or pinpoint assassination will achieve our all larger goals.

We just have to try something.

In the past we have seen the same act (let’s pick ”targeted assassination”) get quite opposite effects.

For example, Hamas’ chief bomb maker, Yehia Ayash was assassinated by Israel in 1996.
The result was a rash of bombings.

However, Hamas leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin was pinpoint assassinated in 2004.
But no uptick in attacks occurred!

So, most likely, the enemy’s capabilities were more motivational to their response than the attack, itself.
In other words, sure the enemy will SAY it did such-and-such as a response to the assassination, BUT only if he already has the capacity to respond.
Otherwise he can fume but not act.

Saddam Hussein had been sending $25,000 to each family who had a relative die attacking in Israel….even when American citizens were among the dead.
The egregious oil-for-food scam was enriching his war chest.
He considered the USA his enemy.
He had to be stopped.
He was.
That the plan was imperfect and ended up in many unintended consequences does not negate the good that was done.

Never-fail-Greg, babbling incoherently (and apparently off-topic again, I can’t really say), again.

I can not imagine a sane person of any political stripe thinking that another 9/11 (foreign enemy), or Oklahoma City (unknown, unseen enemy) would benefit any but an enemy.

Are these people saying Obama is an enemy, or are they insane?

@Greg:

Good grief, have you once stopped to think of how much that cheap attack….9/11 cost us in lives and treasure, what it did to family members that live with the memory of that attack and how long it took this country to get through that? The USS Cole, that was pretty reasonable, Khobar Towers, how much could it cost to load up a truck with explosives?

So we go back to the Clinton way of handling terrorism and you think Obama gives them a free hit? Then what? They keep it up, another embassy or an American company on foreign soil. Ever stop to think of what security measures our companies have to maintain overseas?

My granddaughter was at work at that mall when a terrorist attempted to throw grenades in the trash barrels. When the news scanned the parking lot I saw her car. The FBI set him up, but it still was a horrible experience even though we were told in that same newscast no one was in danger, I had to see her that night. Would it be just fine with you if you had a family member at a mall our enemy decides to take out and succeeds if it only cost maybe $1,500? No sense in bothering with that. 🙄

Obama’s luck? What about our luck?

Iran Placing Medium Range Missiles in Venezuela

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1714/iran-missiles-in-venezuela

@ Missy, #8:

I believe you’ve missed my point.

Over one-thousand-billion dollars spent, 7,001 American soldiers killed, and we’re still bracing ourselves for the next attack–which, because of the nature of asymmetrical warfare, they’re still entirely capable of mounting.

The sheer cost of the way we have chosen to respond is how they actually measure the success of the attack. They can’t conquer us militarily. They can continue provoking us into ineffective, enormously expensive responses until they’ve eventually bled us dry. That’s their path to victory.

I’m simply suggesting that we shouldn’t predictably respond in a manner that’s primarily self-damaging. We shouldn’t let the enemy define how a war is waged. Putting a couple of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops on the ground isn’t necessarily the most effective approach. The skillful identification and targeting of specific enemies could work a lot better.

Obama’s approval rating for the last 6 months has been steady. It is almost twice that of the previous POTUS when he held the same job. As far as Americans being killed, each year 15000 or more of us are murdered by our fellow citizens for non political reasons. You are far more likely to get hit by lightning than be killed by a terrorist. The purpose of terrorism is to create terror in our minds, they seem to have done that all too well. Why should we allow them to make us so afraid when there is so little real danger from them. Oh yeah and I live in New York City probably the biggest target in the whole country.

Greg, what makes you think that we are NOT skillfully identifying and targeting specific enemies with our troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Bleeding us dry is much more likely to take place by the use of immigration, breeding and living on the dole all while becoming radicalized.

That is the system that bled dry several countries in Europe.

BBC Uncovers Schools Teaching 6-Year olds How to Hack off thieves hands …

UK: Anti-Semitism Rampant in Muslim Schools

Dutch politician urges Jews to go to friendlier countries because of “the anti-Semitism among Dutchmen of Moroccan descent, whose numbers keep growing.”

There are eighty-five sharia courts up and running in England, while France has declared over 725 “no-go zones,” which the French state no longer controls.

The French government calls them “zones of urban sensibility,” and they are hotbeds of both civil unrest and drug trafficking, since organized crime naturally gravitates to areas where the police fear to tread.

Scholar Daniel Pipes, an expert on radical Islam, reports that unofficial zones of urban sensibility have begun appearing in England.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=40004

Maybe Mr. Halperin meant Obama needed another 7-11….

ya know for cigarettes, slurpies…

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

I guess it’s about time to “wag the dog.”

Read some old documents and recycle some old blueprints.

It seems pretty clear to me that President Bush intended to disrupt the entire Islamist power structure in the middle east. Iran must have been on the agenda after Iraq then perhaps Syria. That concept, war on Islamism, fell apart when the apparent absence of WMDs in Iraq was seized upon with such gleeful enthusiasm by the silly socialists at home. It became an exercise in regaining power from a President who owned unprecedented popularity.

The leftist media joined with the Cindy Sheehan wackos and created a daily drone of negative spin on the war effort until the TV led grazers with short attention spans joined with the radical left and gave them a handle on power. Bush’s “War on Terror” mired down in Iraq once the Islamists caught on that they could defeat America politically by supporting a prolonged conflict in Iraq.

So Iran won. Obama and the left will help seal their victory by ignoring their impending takeover in Iraq and passively accepting Iran as the nuclear power in control of all of the middle east oil. And the trolls here will blame the impending mess on Bush, as usual.

Incidentally, Obama had his opportunity for leadership already. Had he displayed a shred of the competence his amazing intellectual heft was bound to deliver (according to the legacy media, anyway) at this time, he’d enjoy much more public support. Instead, the name Deepwater Horizon is buried deep in the dusty archives of the leftist media, never to be mentioned, except furtively, in hushed tones among insiders.

@ DaNang67, #15:

So Iran won.

To the extent that we thoughtfully removed one of Iran’s most troublesome and costly long-term security threats at our own nation’s expense, I guess maybe they did.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was dedicated to an empty chair. Last year’s prize was dedicated to an empty suit. The Brit press is pushing Assange for next year’s prize. It is a prize for destroying America and a super lefty accreditation. Two failures in Nopenhagen and the World Cup awarded to Qatar ( sunstroke anyone?). The surgerender in Afghanistan. The debt being bought by the Red Chinese. The economy in ruins. Crushing debt. The Won needs something or Washington will face a complete makeover. He deserves the ” Peace Prize “.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, both Kimmel and Short were golfing.

@Greggy: You said:

I don’t think he’d react to an attack that cost an enemy $500,000 to mount by launching two inconclusive overseas wars that have pushed the resulting financial damages to the United States up to over $1 trillion–and counting.

No, Obama would just use an economic crisis to spend like a drunken sailor (and this is giving drunken sailors a bad name because they at least spend their OWN money) and mount TRILLIONS of dollars upon our already high national debt.

Bush did fight two wars, and what do we have to show for them?

Saddam Hussein, one of the most brutal dictators in history out of power.

25 million Iraqis liberated.

Major terror networks attacked, setback and in some cases nearly destroyed.

The only caveat is that we have not yet found Bin Laden.

Obama spends MORE than Bush did in EIGHT YEARS, in only TWO YEARS and what do we have to show for it?

Record high unemployment rates.

The worst recession in how many years??

Jobs leaving the country in droves.

Oil production nearly shut down in the USA.

Hmmm, you are right Greggy. Thanks for prompting me to make that comparison.

Could Obama jusr step down now with some dignity? It would show
that he cared enough for this country (that has been so good to him).
that he wanted no more discourtesy or harm to come to the nation.

“….a floundering George Bush” Wha? He was floundering? 8 months after he was inaugurated??

Ain’t it grand to be able to say whatever you want without having to stick to the facts?