View From the U.K.

The Telegraph has a great piece on Obama and the terrorist who tried to ruin Christmas.

Complacency, faux moralising and partisan shots at Republicans. It was a neat summary of where Obama is going wrong after the Christmas Day debacle when the Nigerian knicker bomber managed to waltz onto a Detroit-bound flight.

For a man who campaigned denouncing the politicisation of national security under President George W Bush, it is worth noting how intensely political Obama's treatment of what might henceforth be known as Underpantsgate has been.

His White House recognised its political vulnerability more readily than it comprehended the level of danger faced by Americans.

. . .

The incompetence of the US intelligence bureaucracy is not the only thing that makes Underpantsgate so damaging for Obama. More serious is his failure to understand or acknowledge the nature of the enemy - and to view war as mere politics.

Really, the Brits were kinder to Obama than the U.S. media would have been had the episode taken place under the Bush administration: there would have been complaints that the president "failed to connect the dots"; complaints that he should cut his vacation short and rush back to Washington; and then the inevitable Congressional hearing followed by a thousand page report.