In his Jan. 8 Newsmax column, Ralph Reed — Newsmax’s latest attempt at career rehabilitation — cites as evidence that “Obama’s real-life 3 a.m. phone call has come, and he has flunked the test” that he “took days (while he played golf in Hawaii) to step before the cameras and acknowledge the obvious: a massive, systemic, and nearly disastrous failure of intelligence” in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing.
Reed doesn’t mention that President Bush took twice as long as Obama to respond to another attempted bombing, that of shoe bomber Richard Reid, let alone assert that Bush’s silence meant that he was soft on terror.
Reed also baselessly attacked the Obama administration for giving accused Christmas Day attempted bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “full Miranda rights, and allowing him to lawyer up so we can get no information about his al-Qaida handlers.” In fact, intelligence officials have already spent “a number of hours” with Abdulmutallab, in which “usable actionable intelligence” was obtained.