Hotline After Dark -- So Take A Nap, Then Fire Ze Missiles!

By Rachelle Douillard-Proulx

"World News," "Evening News" and "Nightly News" each led with the Obama admin.'s review of what went wrong on the 12/25 attempted attack.

Pres. Obama's reaction to the report on the attempted terrorist attack that took place 12/25 dominated news coverage 1/7 p.m.

MS Gov. Haley Barbour (R) went on "Your World" 1/7 p.m.

Barbour, on Obama's remarks: "I thought what he said, generally, was accurate. What he said, generally, was what needed to be said. The problem is the doing. It's not the talking. ... And we're going to have to see how this administration does. I thought one of the things that the American people appreciated about the Bush administration, after September 11, not one time did the terrorists who were trying to kill us and end our way of life, not one time were they able to attack the mainland United States again."

Barbour, on whether someone should be fired: "I don't know enough of the facts. I can say this. You shouldn't fire somebody for the political effect. You shouldn't fire somebody because somebody else says somebody needs to go. We need to handle this in a real way. This shouldn't be about optics or about politics. This is about problem-solving, except that the problem is a life-or-death problem."

After the jump, more on the report and Obama's reaction.

More Barbour: "Now, if they determine that somebody failed and that this caused this to happen, then you are talking about something different. Frankly, where I grew up, if that happened, the person that did the failure would step up to the plate and resign without having to be fired."

Barbour, on Obama saying "the buck stops with me": "He's right, of course. And that's what we should expect. And I don't care what you're the leader of. The leader has to be trustworthy. The leader has to take responsibility for problems" (FNC, 1/7).

IT'S LIKE FINDING A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Pols across the nets took time to address Obama's remarks.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA): "What I am struck by is how forthcoming the president has been, to put the information out there on the table, to acknowledge that we do have shortcomings, but, very importantly, how he has directed the executive branch, the intelligence community, in this instance, and the corrections that need to be made. And I think that they are spot-on."

More Eshoo: "We can't keep building haystacks where we can't find things. And so the dots do have to be connected. I think the president was more than serious. And I also think that it was important when he said, this is not a time for partisanship, but for citizenship. We all can do something here. And I hope that we will all make note of that. I think it's a very important thing that he said. I was certainly struck by it" ("PBS NewsHour," PBS, 1/7).

Ex-Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA): "I think the president made exactly the right kind of speech. I couldn't find anything that he said
with which I disagreed. He's been mugged by reality, and he's making exactly the kind of reaction. I think the irony is that both he and President Bush were very similar in many respects. Both of them spent the first eight or nine months of their presidency not paying an awful lot of attention to this kind of threat to the United States. Both got hit by a big disaster, and I think both responded very, very positively" ("Hardball," MSNBC, 1/7).

Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX): "I was happy that the president came out and stepped up to the plate and said that the buck stops with him. That's critically important, that we get leadership from the top. And I applaud him for doing that. But, again, we need to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. We had all the information out there to connect these dots together. ... This individual, Mr. Abdulmutallab, got on an aircraft with a bomb. And just God bless our country, again, that he didn't set it off when he tried to" ("PBS NewsHour," PBS, 1/7).

Ex-Rep. Susan Molinari (R): "I thought the president handled himself well today. He called a terrorist a terrorist. He called a war a war. He showed leadership. I guess time will tell. I think it is going to take some time for the American public to trust all the people who were standing up there with him to do the right thing, and figure out where these cracks and holes were and get them plugged. But today I think the president showed himself to make this a top priority of his administration" ("Ed Show," MSNBC, 1/7).

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER

Pundits also got in on the action.

Ex-WH adviser David Gergen: "I think the one thing he did do was ... to take personal responsibility for this, just as John F. Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs and Ronald Reagan did after the Marines' barracks were blown up in Lebanon in the early 1980s. I think that was a step forward. But to believe that this is going to end the partisanship over this issue, I think, just doesn't recognize current political realities. Republicans believe deep in their bones that this would not have happened had it not been for a certain complacency or people taking their eyes off the ball on terrorism" ("AC 360," CNN, 1/7).

NBC's Kohlmann: "I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, in the sense that he has taken responsibility for this. He said there were failures. ... My problem with this is that he still is shying away from firing anyone, because he says that there were human errors. If there are human errors, somebody needs to pay a price. If you work for a Fortune 500 company and you cause errors that nearly cause catastrophic damage to that company, you would be fired immediately. And that needs to be the same mentality in our intelligence communities" ("Ed Show," MSNBC, 1/7).

CNN contributor Roland Martin: "You spend all the time sitting here talking about this department or that department and you lose sight of exactly what the whole point is. And so the president stepping up with the buck stops with me, now here's what we're going to do to fix the problem. That's what the American people want to hear. We don't want to hear the same old political nonsense of well, you did this and you did that" ("Situation Room," 1/7).