Every Member of Congress and commissioned officer (civilian and military) in federal service as well as every enlisted service member takes an oath that requires they promise to:
"support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…"
This oath is required by statute. The Presidential oath, the only oath in the Constitution, does not contain that language:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
I only raise that because the issue of "enemies foreign or domestic" has raised its ugly head in Boston in Damascus and in Benghazi.
First Boston.
I don't know very much about the ins and outs of visa vigilance as they pertain to one Tamerlan Tsarnaev (the dead Boston bomber). That's not much of a problem.
What is a problem is when the FBI, DHS, NSA, NSC, CIA, and, for all I know, MIB don't seem to be able to track a guy about whom they have been warned. And some or all of those agencies were warned by our loyal allies in the security area, the Russians.
At one point we were told that Tsarnaev slipped through the immigration net having taking a six month trip to Russia because his name had been misspelled.
I did a test on this. I did a search on "Rihc Galen"
Google assumed I meant "Rich Galen" and found 3.3 million hits.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has since said that the redundancies in the immigration systems are every bit as good as Google's (my comparison, not hers) but the reason Tsarnaev got back in was because the FBI alert on him had expired and so his re-entry was not noted.
That "beep-beep-beep" sound you hear is team player Sec. Napolitano backing up the bus having thrown the FBI under it.
So many questions. How about the wife? She lives in an apartment with - forget about bomb parts she might not have recognized - how about asking what the hell multiple pressure cookers were doing in the living room. Were they going into the housewares business?
Ok. That's the domestic enemies.
The New York Times was all over a story that President Barack Obama's off-handed remark last summer that if Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used or moved chemical weapons that would be "a red line for us."
Just about everyone now believes Assad has used poison gas and is, in fact, consolidating his stores of chemical weapons - moving them around.
One unnamed high Obama Administration source, attempting to erase, or at least blur, the "red line" was quoting in the Times as saying:
"If he drops sarin [gas] on his own people, what's that got to do with us?"
This is known as the Lucky Lindy theory of geopolitics.
Obama (nor anyone else) is eager to get involved in another Middle Eastern war, but his own off-the-cuff language may have put the United States into a diplomatic, military and/or legal box.
Then there are the enemies foreign and domestic.
CBS reporter Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation," said Greg Hicks, a 22-year foreign service diplomat who was the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the strike has told Congressional investigators:
"I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go. I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.
CBS News reminds us on its website that the very morning the U.N. Ambassador was racing from Sunday show to Sunday show to claim the attack was a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand, "President of Libya Mohammed al-Magariaf, said his government had 'no doubt that this was preplanned, predetermined.'"
Al-Magariaf said that on "Face the Nation" moments before Amb. Rice came on to flatly contradict him.
Why? Because Obama was in the midst of a Presidential campaign and did not want to give Republicans a chance to say that all of his attempts to avoid the Bushian phrase "war on terror" had emboldened the terrorists to attack the U.S. compound in Libya.
NBC reported only a week after Obama's inauguration in 2009 that the "War on Terror Phrase [was] Fading" in new Administration. Obama was using snappy language like: "The enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism" even back then.
This second term is off to a very, very rocky start and the Ship of State is tippy because of the incompetence of Obama's own people.