Obama supporters mocked Rudy Giuliani’s recent claim to George Stephanopolous, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” stubbornly avoiding Giuliani’s obvious implication that he was speaking post-9/11.  Until last week, Democrats loved to excoriate Giuliani for making endless references to the terrorist attack that occurred while he was mayor of New York; now they claim he forgets it happened.  Which is it?

Conservatives’ point is that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 9/11, which Bush did not have available to him until, surprisingly—9/11.  The Ft. Hood and Flight 253 attacks happened in the first year of Obama’s administration, and 9/11 happened in the first year of Bush’s administration, but Obama had the example of 9/11 to learn from, and Bush did not.  (Even if you count the thwarted attack by the shoe bomber in December 2001, that bomber tried to strike just months after 9/11, when fully revamped security procedures were not running as smoothly as they are now; also, the bomber used the novel, unprecedented technique of wearing the bomb on his person so that it would not be detected by luggage screeners.)

Obama not only had the example of 9/11, he had seven years in which to witness and debate and vote on the implementation of the policies his predecessor devised that kept the country safe in the years after 9/11.  Obama denounced and campaigned against these tactics every chance he got.  He hasn’t revoked all of the Bush policies—upon assuming the Presidency, he must have received access to hair-raising intelligence that made him realize the suicidal folly of reversing Bush on everything—but he has slackened up enough, rhetorically and policy-wise, that our security standards have slipped and our enemies have become emboldened.

It is not enough to say that Obama has forgotten the lessons of 9/11.  He has actively rejected them.  He has argued that doing the opposite of what Bush did will keep us safer.  We are seeing how well the Obama Doctrine is working out in his first 11 months in office.

Another error in the “Bush-was-bad-so-Obama’s-off-the-hook” argument is that Bush did not do anything to actively facilitate the occurrence of 9/11.  In contrast, the Ft. Hood shootings were aided by the politically correct refusal of the U.S. Army—under Commander-in-Chief Obama—to recognize murderous jihadist sentiments expressed by Major Nidal Hasan openly and repeatedly while in medical school and residency, and the promotion Hasan received despite his poor performance reviews.  The Flight 253 near-attack was made possible by the Obama administration’s failure to act on numerous warnings available to it, such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father having called the U.S. Embassy to report him, Abdulmutallab’s not having a passport or luggage, and his having bought a one-way ticket with cash.

But there’s an even more damning flaw to the contention that Bush should have been able to prevent 9/11, and is therefore as bad as or worse than Obama on national security.  Namely: just what would Bush opponents have preferred that he do in his first eight months in office to prevent terrorist acts, when they now scream bloody murder at the slightest suggestion of profiling at airports, call Bush Big Brother for trying to monitor terrorist communications, and express their clear disapproval of any war Bush started abroad to target Al-Qaeda?  Are liberals implying that they would have been fine with Bush doing all of these things in a pre-9/11 world?  They’re not even fine with The One doing these things in a post-9/11 world.

The left have been digging up examples of localized attacks carried out by truly isolated (not Abdulmutallab-style “isolated”) loonies—such as Bruce Ivins’ anthrax-laced letters to news broadcasters in September 2001, Hesham Hadayet’s shooting of two Israelis at LAX in July 2002, the Beltway sniper attacks in October 2002—as proof that Bush didn’t keep us safe.  Ignore for the moment that when each of these incidents happened, the same people criticized Bush for using these events to “hype” the threat of terrorism to justify extra security measures.  Instead ask: what level of government intervention into our lives would have been necessary to prevent every one of these attacks?  And how likely is it that liberals would have supported Bush’s carrying out such interventions at the time?

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Despite the mainstream media’s refusal to accept it, there is one factor more reliable than any other in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies:

(1) It’s not whether he lives in third world poverty and resents being overshadowed by the Imperialist West.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, was the son of a prominent, wealthy Nigerian bank chairman.  Abdulmutallab attended the British School in Togo and University College London, the latter of which cost as much as Obama shells out for his daughters to attend a semester at Sidwell Friends.  Abdulmutallab’s college dorm was a $6 million apartment in London’s West End.

If poverty caused terrorism, then a corollary of this argument is that a country’s efforts to relieve poverty should prevent terrorism.  Yet the U.S. provided Arlington, VA-born Major Nidal Malik Hasan with a free medical education worth tens of thousands of dollars, which apparently did not console him enough to keep him from murdering fellow soldiers on his military post in Ft. Hood, Texas.  Indeed, Hasan planned and carried out the attack after having been promoted from captain to major, despite miserable performance reviews.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and San Anselmo, California and attended a “California Distinguished School” in the Tamalpais Union High School District.

If poverty caused terrorism, then poor people the world over—rice farmers in China, untouchables in India, non-flat screen TV owners in the U.S.—would be rising up en masse to wreak havoc in hijackings and suicide bombings.

(2) It’s not post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or any garden-variety psychological malady.  If it were, we would expect suicide bombings from Vietnam vets, or from the New York Times staff after the public option was dropped from the health care bill.

(3) It’s not whether we’re currently at war with the place where the individual resides.  I don’t recall any recent U.S. incursions into Nigeria, Arlington, or San Anselmo.

The most reliable factor in predicting whether an individual will engage in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies is: whether the individual adheres to an ideology that encourages engaging in terrorist acts against the United States and its allies.

Never mind that the ideology in question always happens to be Islamist.  At this point, even I would be fine with overlooking this fact if we would just do something about these threats when they surface.

If the warning signs sent by would-be terrorists were densely coded and difficult to decipher, delayed action by our national security officials might be understandable.  But a PowerPoint presentation urging Muslims to cut off the heads of infidels and pour burning oil down their throats is not subtle.

Nidal Hasan delivered a now-infamous lecture to an auditorium of army psychiatrists in which he imparted charming Koranic admonishments for the nonbeliever such as “Seize him and drag him in the midst of the blazing fire.  Then pour over his head the torment of boiling water” and “We shall burn them in fire.  As often as their skins are roasted through, we shall change them for other skins that they may taste the punishment.”  This is not exactly the Venona cables.

Abdulmutallab’s high school teacher reported that, when he wasn’t busy captaining the water polo team, he repeatedly defended the Taliban’s tactics in classroom discussions and endorsed the 9/11 attacks.  Abdulmutallab disappeared in October, cut off ties with his family, and moved to Yemen to learn Arabic, all of which prompted his father to call the American Embassy in Nigeria to warn that Umar was a likely threat to the U.S.

John Walker Lindh began studying Islam in high school and converted when he was 16, moved to Yemen to study at a madrassa when he was 19, and wrote his family letters, not asking for money, but praising the bombing of the USS Cole by Sudan-funded terrorists.

Yet regarding the motivations of these attackers, the current Democratic administration warns us not to jump to any conclusions, or at least any that might interfere with the bestowal of glory upon Allah.  I can sooner conceive of stubborn liberals going after Nigerian bankers as a suspect class before I can imagine them pointing the finger at Islamists.

If we can throw an American in jail for joking that he’d like to shoot the president, can we please add a militant, well-funded Islamist with terrorist connections to the crummy no-fly list?

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

If there were ever a group that U.S. law should consider shielding through hate crime legislation, it would be: Americans.  The U.S. should be uniquely interested in protecting its citizens against attacks for being residents of this country, in the same way it protects its citizens against foreign attacks and its soldiers against enemies on the battleground.

If there were ever a setting in which pro-American hate crime protections should be enforced, it is in the military.  American soldiers, more than any other group, actively display dedication to pro-American ideals.

If there were ever a cultural group in modern times that has demonstrated persistent, widespread hostility toward and willingness to engage in violent attacks against Americans, especially Americans in the military, it is radical Islamists.

Naturally, army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who adhered to extremist Islamist ideology, sought connections with Al Qaeda, and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he massacred 13 soldiers and wounded dozens at Fort Hood last week, is being portrayed by the mainstream media and the present administration as a guy who needs OSHA counseling.

Muslim apologists have been telling us to not jump to conclusions (except that the killings were caused by stress), that the murders weren’t related to Islam, that it’s “speculation” that the military ignored warning signs regarding Hasan.  We get clueless gems like this from the New York Times on Monday: “It is unclear what might have motivated Major Hasan.”  Wusses like Lindsey Graham don’t help by claiming that the murders were “not about his religion—the fact that this man was a Muslim.”  (Wait—isn’t that a conclusion?)  It takes a hawk like Joe Lieberman to initiate hearings into Hasan’s conduct and the military’s failure to eject him for anti-American actions in which he engaged for years.

In the interest of preventing future attacks, I propose that we learn from the following warning signs:

•    Hasan identified as an Islamic fundamentalist, advocated for Muslims to “rise up and attack Americans” in retaliation for war against Muslims abroad, and espoused anti-Semitic views.

•    Hasan rejoiced over the murder of an army recruiter in Arkansas in June by an American convert to Islam.  According to Colonel Terry Lee, who worked with Hasan at Fort Hood, after the attack Hasan helpfully suggested, “Maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.”

•    In 2003 Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar—another American convert—slaughtered two U.S. soldiers and wounded 14 more in a grenade and rifle attack on a base in Kuwait in retaliation for the war in Iraq.

•    Classmates in Hasan’s master’s program complained of his anti-American views and his insistence that sharia outweighs U.S. constitutional law.

•    Fellow psychiatrists reported that, at a Grand Rounds talk during his residency, Hasan lectured his audience on Koranic justice, including the proscription to behead nonbelievers or pour hot oil down their throats and set them on fire.  Hasan defended suicide bombers, a position he has taken in postings on jihad-themed websites.

•    Hassan called the war on terror a war on Islam and said that military service for the U.S. is incompatible with Muslim beliefs.  (He may be on to something!  About 0.6% of the country identifies as Muslim, compared to only 0.25% of the military.)  Hasan argued that Muslim soldiers should be exempted from combat as conscientious objectors.

•    At Fort Hood, Hasan received warnings from supervisors for attempting to convert his patients to Islam, though he maintains it was entirely their choice whether to receive castor oil or hot oil for their remedies.

•    The FBI had been investigating Hasan since 2008 and was aware that he had sent dozens of e-mails to Al Qaeda spiritual leader Anwar al-Awlaki.  Hasan and his family attended the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia where al-Awlaki served as imam in the months leading up to September 11 and where two of the 9/11 hijackers worshiped.

Even if Hasan’s admonitions to slaughter infidels were not evidence enough to convict him of some kind of crime, he should have been ruled unfit for his position by military officials.

Hate crime legislation has been justified as necessary due to specious defenses offered for crimes against minority groups, such as the claim by lawyers for Harvey Milk’s assassin that junk food contributed to his inability to control his actions, or the “homosexual panic defense” that some who feel threatened by advances from a gay person enter a state of irrationality that prompts them to murderously strike out.  Hate crime laws have also been offered to cover minority groups whom police might not adequately protect due to racial bias.  The solution to specious legal defenses and lapses in police enforcement is to treat members of all groups equally, not some groups better than others.

As a consequence of this inverted mentality, we are warned by our political leaders to ignore the cause of obviously jihad-motivated killing of U.S. soldiers and accept spurious explanations for the massacre such as stress over anticipated deployment in Afghanistan or the inability of a trained psychiatrist to listen to stories from combat veterans.

The latest enlightened word, from Fort Hood base commander Lieutenant General Robert Cone, regarding the military’s plan to prevent future violence: “What we’re looking for is people with personal problems, not at all related to their religion—not at all.”

I hear the sugar rush from the Halloween candy civilians sent in care packages can lead soldiers to do some crazy things.