This is just a recognition of total regulatory and oversight failure.

[Welcome Anne Kornblut, and Host Nona Willis Aronowitz] [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev] Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win The 2008 election season came at [...]

After 9-11, columnists from across the political spectrum were writing defenses of torture, calls for reducing liberty to achieve security and exhortations for the bombing of any number of Muslim nations. Today, a few of those still crop up every now and again. But reliable establishment weathervane David Brooks offers something different in the wake of the failed underpants bombing, shocking in its reasonableness, that could represent a shift away from the hysteria and bedwetting that often reveals itself during any discussion of terrorism.

I remember when the National Review editorial board demanded the resignation of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice after they discovered an unread copy of Bin Laden Determined to Strike US under a stack of InStyles and Jimmy Choo catalogs in her office, and how Donald Rumsfeld had to wrestle the tantō away from Rice when she attempted seppuku.