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Dennis Blair out—not because he’s no good on national security, but because he’s not sufficiently bad
According to Jake Tapper of ABC, Obama has accepted the resignation of Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, with whose performance he was unsatisfied. But don’t think this means that the president has had it with left-wing incompetents in national security positions who seem to have no notion of defending America from enemies. Tapper says that even as the president’s confidence in Blair declined, his confidence in his top terrorism advisor, the beyond egregious John Brennan (that’s my description, not Tapper’s), has increased. Maybe Obama pushed out Blair because he wasn’t egregious enough.
After I drafted the above paragraph, with its point, based on nothing but my speculation, on why Blair has been dismissed, I came upon an entry at Powerline which makes the same point, though based on information. Powerline says that within the Obama administration, Blair may be what passes for an adult on national security matters, and that is why he is gone. Blair has criticized the FBI’s decision to treat Abdul Mutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, as a criminal suspect instead of as an enemy combatant, and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says that Blair is “the one person you could count on for rationality among Holder, Napolitano and Brennan.”
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