GOP: Obama encouraging terrorists?

Don't say you weren't warned. A vote for Obama/Biden was a vote to weaken America's resolve in the War on Terrorism. Don't you wish you could redo the 2008 election now?

From a story by Glenn Thrush and Martin Kady II on the continued weakness shown by the Obama Administration and how Republicans are capitalizing on the Democrat's Achilles heel:

Republicans have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253 — a significant departure from the calibrated, less partisan responses that have followed other recent terrorist activity.

The strategy — coming as the Republican leadership seeks to exploit Democratic weaknesses heading into the 2010 midterms — is in many ways a natural for a party that views protecting the U.S. homeland as its ideological raison d'etre and electoral franchise.

President Obama's GOP critics have been emboldened during the past 48 hours by the stumbling initial response of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who spent Monday retracting her Sunday claim that "the system worked" in the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab's near takedown of a jet ferrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit.

"In the past six weeks, you've had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

"I think Secretary Napolitano and the rest of the Obama administration view their role as law enforcement, first responders dealing with the aftermath of an attack," Hoekstra told POLITICO. "And we believe in a forward-looking approach to stopping these attacks before they happen."

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went even further, telling FOX News that the Christmas attack proved President Obama's talk-to-your-enemies approach might actually be encouraging terrorists.

"[S]oft talk about engagement, closing Gitmo, these things are not going to appease the terrorists," he said. "They're going to keep coming after us, and we can't have politics as usual in Washington, and I'm afraid that's what we've got right now with airport security."

Read the full story at POLITICO.com