Look--It's The White House! Who's In Charge?

If you're not using a large screen, click on the picture so you can play "how many times do the words 'White House' appear in this picture?" Channeling Harry Truman, the President recently announced "the buck stops with me," but apparently somebody forgot to tell Janet Napolitano.

The picture was taken nearly two weeks after Napolitano first announced that she had the situation stemming from the Flight 253 underwear bombing fiasco and near-disaster completely under control. She had declared security procedures to be working perfectly. That was shortly before she said that security procedures were a mess, and just before the president announced there had been a "systemic failure." The picture apparently demonstrates that Napolitano is still very much in the president's favor, even now.

On Thursday evening, the president declared that the battle for control over the White House had resulted in perfected security procedures, and dammit, he's in charge. He even took personal responsibility for the US intelligence failure, at least according to another one of the residents of the White House, ABC News. Of course there's no mention of any change in procedures, but he took responsibility, didn't he? What a man! What next? A president who thinks he's the commander-in-chief?

Quickly retreating to his "can't we all just get along?" mode , he also announced that no officials would be fired (see Napolitano, above). He almost seemed to take pride in his humility (if such a thing is possible) in announcing the failure, while completely forgetting to reassure the nation by laying out any plans he might have for correcting the systemic problem he acknowledged. Frankly, I think he should borrow an antique guillotine from France and send heads rolling all over D.C. and the immediate environs. He's an amateur bowler, after all, and he should be tossing those heads at every agency and agency executive that was so busy protecting his or her own fiefdom that they didn't notice the most obvious terrorist since the Green Goblin boarding a plane in Amsterdam.

Obama actually spoke the dread word "enemy" and aimed the epithet at Al Qaeda, after first using the words "terrorist" and "war." Well, that's a start, and at least he was sophisticated enough to refer to "Al Qaeda affiliates" in recognition of the fact that the original organization has decentralized and metastasized. If he ever recognizes that the enemy is not just Al Qaeda and its affiliates, but rather worldwide Islamofascism (foreign and domestic), he'll be on to something. Still, though he can't seem to help himself most of the time, for once Obama didn't note a gazillion times that the watch lists failed because they were put into place under the Bush administration.

On his first outing as a movie director, actor/dancer Gene Kelly was chided for his lack of directorial skills. After a scene was shot, and he wasn't happy with it, he would give the actors another opportunity. When they asked what he wanted them to do this time, he is said to have responded "do it better." It appears that Obama's leadership contains the same skills. The New York Times thinks that Obama told the security agencies to "do things faster." The Christian Science Monitor reports that Obama has told his agencies to "keep doing what they are doing, only faster and in a more coherent manner." All the MSM publications reported a "change in tone," but none were able to point out a change in substance.

Gene Kelly got better at what he was doing, and learned how to give directions and set the stage for movie success. But there, only a movie was at stake. Today, we have a president who is simply incapable of giving direct orders, clarifying what he wants done, and making sure that it gets done quickly and efficiently. A great deal more than a mere movie is at stake here. The lives of American citizens and the safety of the entire nation are at stake, and the big chief has finally awakened to the fact that we do have an actual enemy. The big question now is "when will he start directing?" Or maybe the real question is "is he even capable of it?"