Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was sitting on a Delta flight to Detroit, zipping through the air at around 600mph seeking a rendevous with what was supposed to be his glorious Christmas Day destiny, if only Allah would will it so.  Allah, apparently indifferent to Umar's reported plight of loneliness, didn't.  Thus, Allah be praised.  Perhaps Allah took umbrage at the idea of killing a bunch of mostly Christians on the day the Christian world celebrates the birth of Jesus.  Islamic extremists might do well to pause and consider this.  Like Mother Nature, it is unwise to piss off God.

And so, as Umar fumbled with his home-made explosive, surrounding passengers predictably sprang into action, thwarting the bombing attempt.  For the good guys - and mark my words, despite what Obama and his ilk think, we are the good guys - we won this little insignificant skirmish on the front lines of a religious extremist war.  Hurray for us.

In the aftermath of Umar's failed attempt to meet his maker in high style by taking as many other souls with him as possible, the predictable and not unwarranted who-dunnit blame gamers popped up out of the woodwork.  Normally we find the blame-game a bit irritating.   However, while surely it is necessary to dig into why early warnings went unnoticed, and do-not-fly databases were not timely updated and so on for the purposes of lessons learned, it is the bigger picture that we worry about. 

It would be all too easy to play the political game and just hang this around Obama's neck and blame him for weakening America's defense.  While I believe Obama has an agenda to emasculate the United States internationally (doing a 'great' job at that so far), I can't bring myself to dive in and join that game.  At least not yet.  I don't think the fact that this would-be suicide terrorist got through the system can be directly laid at the President's feet.  Although we can say with great confidence that Department Of Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano is quite talented at making a buffoon out of herself.  Every day she continues in that post is an embarrassment to the Obama Administration - and that is absolutely Obama's responsibility.

What we think this incident really points to is a fundamental failure of the underlying purpose and intent of forming the gigantor bureaucracy known as Homeland Security in the first place.  The Dept. of Homeland Security was not an Obama invention, though we suppose that since it is a massive Government hole in the ground, he whole-heartedly supports it's bastard existence. 

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 terrorist attack on New York City, then President Bush initially opposed the creation of the Dept of Homeland Security, and I think correctly so.  Roughly nine months later, in the late spring of 2002, Bush reversed course due to mounting political and public pressure.  Political leaders, and talking heads on TV, were all clamoring for a new layer of Governmental bureaucracy as the end-all-be-all solution to the multi-agency lapses that contributed to the 9/11 attacks.    Thus, Bush simply could not resist the political tide, and the Department of Homeland Security was established on November 25, 2002, by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.  A 200,000 employee mega-bureaucracy was born.

Most people who have done Corporate troubleshooting in their careers, as I have done, understand that when tasked with fixing a dysfunctional group or organization, the one thing that you do not do to solve the problem is add another huge layer of bureaucratic management on top of the already dysfunctional group.   And that, of course, is precisely what the grand solution was for solving the well documented Governmental lapses leading to 9/11.  The primary mission of the Department of Homeland Security was, and is, to prevent terrorists from attacking the populace, either from within or from without.  And here, lonely Mr. Abdulmutallab has done us the courtesy of demonstrating that DHS is an abysmal failure.  We were just lucky that he did so without killing anybody. 

Not a surprise.

Of course, I believe the right thing to do is abolish the Dept of Homeland Security in favor of a new leaner, more flexible intelligence structure to deal with the Islamic extremist threat.  But I  also know that it is easier to get a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a liberal to let go of a massive Governmental bureaucracy.  Particularly so with liberals these days - failure is absolutely an option, and in some cases, the obviously preferred outcome.  That the DHS behemoth failed in it's primary mission is both a lesson for the obtuse among us, and a dark warning of things to come.  I am not speaking just of the immediate security issues surrounding this would-be bomber - such as why didn't Al Qaeda execute with it's usual M.O. of multiple attacks coordinated for simultaneous execution?  Was this a test to see if the concept worked?  Was the lone-bomber scenario just because the US has successfully crippled Al Qaeda operationally?  What about these reports of several hundred terrorists in training in Yemen?  Questions.  Questions.  And more questions.

It's not just all that.

As just about everyone knows by now, the Senate just passed an abomination of a bill "reforming" heath care services in the United States.  A new, and soon-enough-to-be staggering Federal bureaucracy is about to spring up out of the grass.  This bureaucracy is going to invade your life in the most personal of ways.   And it is doomed to fail in it's stated mission, just as the DHS has failed in it's mission, as all massive bureaucracy's are doomed to fail.

Government, left unchecked as it is now under the Obama Administration, will consume us all.  And absolutely no good can come of it. 

The sleepers must awaken.