Face The Nation: Obama’s Issue Is “The Competency Of His Government”

You know its getting bad when your starting to lose liberal talking heads like Bob Schieffer. Here he is with his chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford on Face the Nation yesterday discussing the The Crotch Bomber and why the issue will continue to haunt Team Obama:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Jan, some people, critics of the President are saying that perhaps the response to this was one of the low points of this administration.

JAN CRAWFORD: Well, I mean when you’re talking about the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano coming out and insisting that the system worked and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs saying on this program last week, pretty much the same language that the system has worked. That’s a problem. I mean obviously the American people can look out there and go, well, you know, it didn’t.

But it’s not just those sound bites. I mean those are sound bites. The reason that’s an issue for Obama is that it goes to the bigger question of the competency of his government and the trust that people have in that government. You look at polls. Polls show that the trust in government is an all time low. Domestically, obviously, stimulus plan hasn’t worked. Unemployment is high. And so now we have a situation where a terrorist can get on an airplane, seemingly could have been caught if some officials had just done a basic Google search of the database. And the Homeland Security secretary is insisting the system worked.

BOB ORR (overlapping): Bob, can I just–

JAN CRAWFORD: That doesn’t you know work. We’re in a–what people are going to want to know is, you know does Obama have a plan? What is his plan to fight this long-term war against a determined Jihadist enemy? What’s the plan and do Americans have the trust that Obama is confident to fight that long-term war?

No one believes that Obama can fight this war, except those who believe kowtowing, begging, and bribing the enemy is the way to win a war. His team hasn’t done anything right so far. From a health care bill that will destroy our economy, to mishandling buy-outs of the private sector, to hemming and hawing over sending troops to Afghanistan, to spinning the mistakes of this latest attack attempt. Now his Administration has ensured that the mistakes of 9/11 are back by bringing in his politically correct thinking and treating the enemy as criminal suspects rather then what they really are….the enemy!

And now you have Bob Schieffer railing against the spin machine of the Obama administration (and you just had to know he would have to throw Bush into the mix):

BOB SCHIEFFER: Finally today, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano is getting hammered because her first response to the undie bomber fiasco was that the system worked. We shouldn’t have been surprised. Sure, she looks a little silly now that the facts are dribbling out. But she was just following the modern bipartisan public relations template in this age of information management.

First, play down the problem. Second, emphasize what did not go wrong. Assure us that those in charge are investigating, and most important, emphasize no one in any position of responsibility is at fault. It’s not lying. But it’s not exactly the whole truth, certainly not the whole story. All she left out was that part about asking us to respect the privacy of those involved. Oh, I’m sorry. I got the government spin mixed up with the Tiger spin.

Here is the difference. Tiger can hire as many people as he wants to make his excuses. It may do him no good but it’s his money to spend as he wishes. When government officials insult us with spin they’re doing it on our dime, which is supposed to be used to operate the government, not to hold news conferences to tell us what a fine job people on the public payroll are doing.

As we learned during Katrina, self-serving spin at the first sign of crisis does not help the situation. It makes it worse. Because it makes it harder to believe anything the government says. Real security is built on trust in government. That requires truth, which should be the beginning of government presentations, not the fallback position.

And Obama is the master of spin while behind the scenes he sends Rhambo out to destroy those who dare question the messiah instead of actually addressing the problem and fixing it.

Curt

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