Just how much terror will it take to wake up the “community organizer in chief” to the real world?

Speaking yesterday to the Detroit Free Press, Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra (MI-2nd) commented on the recent attempt to blow up a plane landing at Detroit Metro Airport:

The ranking Republican on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee said Friday’s suspected terrorist incident at Detroit Metro Airport could provide further evidence of a Yemen-based branch of al-Qaida intent on an attack on American soil and believes the Obama administration needs to take more aggressive action to combat the threat….

“People have got to start connecting the dots here, and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” said Hoekstra.

Noting that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — the Army officer who is accused of killing more than a dozen people at Ft. Hood, Texas, last month — was linked to a radical cleric now in Yemen, Hoekstra said this latest incident could be “one more indication” that the al-Qaida branch there is planning attacks….

Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, Hoekstra went even further, asserting that it was fair to blame the Obama administration, because they had not taken the terrorist threat seriously. Here’s a clip from the program:

Meanwhile, with arrogant disregard for the facts, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and claimed that “the system worked” because the terrorist plot failed. She said:

…the whole process of making sure that we respond properly, correctly and effectively went very smoothly…

Hello? The reason the plot failed had nothing to do with homeland insecurity under the Obama administration. The terrorist’s detonator malfunctioned, and a brave Dutch passenger from the row behind prevented further action by the terrorist. Here’s a clip of Napolitano obfuscating with a straight face:

The fact is that our protective systems failed miserably. The father of the would-be bomber had notified US authorities four weeks earlier that his son was a radical. More than that, British authorities had refused him a visa to return to school in London last May because of false information on his application.

But it gets worse, and you probably won’t find out from US media sources. From the London Daily Mail we learn that he was on a list of terror suspects:

His is one of about 550,000 names in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, known as TIDE, which is maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Centre and was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Intelligence officials said they lacked enough information to place him in the 400,000-person terror watch list or on the no-fly list of fewer than 4,000 people who should be blocked from air travel.

Question: Just how much of a terrorist do you have to be before you get kicked off of our US planes?

So now there are two terrorists that gave clear signs of impending disaster — US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who by any reasonable assessment should have been prevented from acting. And the Obama administration claims that “the system worked.”

UPDATE — See also:

My view by Silvio Canto, Jr. — System worked? Is Sec Napolitano serious?

National Institute of Prevarication — Bomb Fizzled, Napolitano Crows “System Worked”