'Terrorism? What terrorism?'

You have to ask: Why was President Obama so wrong about the Christmas Day terrorist attack?

Why did he call it the act of “an isolated extremist”? That’s just not true, and everyone knows it.

Shouldn’t the president be better informed? Even if he is playing golf in Hawaii? Shouldn’t someone give him the inside dope on the whole thing before he goes out in front of the cameras and makes an unabridged fool of himself?

Here’s another question: Why did he do this again when he made the same “mistake” immediately after the Fort Hood terrorist attack? Is this White House so incompetent that they haven’t learned even a simple lesson that you should not jump to conclusions when all the facts and evidence point in the opposite direction?

Are they so clueless and politically correct that they cannot even admit to themselves that we are under attack in a war against Islamic-jihad terrorists?

But there he goes again. The same president who blew it after Fort Hood did it again — insisting that a terrorist attack was an isolated incident by a lone extremist.

We know that is completely false. Anyone with common sense could see such a claim was absurd. Major Hasan was in contact with Islamic extremists. His connections to terrorism and networks of Islamic jihad have been confirmed as more evidence is uncovered.

And now Al Qaeda is taking credit for the attack on Christmas Day, boasting that they have hundreds of fanatics who are ready to launch similar attacks. How does Obama explain that? If the bomb had worked on Christmas Day, killing hundreds of airline passengers, would he still stick his head in a golf-course bunker and claim it was just an “isolated incident”?

Or is he worse than uninformed and self-deluded? Is he deliberately misleading and deceiving the American people because admitting the truth could be politically damaging?

In the case of Major Hasan, we still don’t know how Obama administration rules may have handcuffed the people who could have stopped a terrorist. The red flags were everywhere. But Obama’s haste to roll back the Bush protections against terrorism may have tied the hands of the FBI and CIA. We know this much: CIA Director Leon Panetta immediately declared that records regarding Hasan were top secret. Did he do that to protect himself and the president he serves from scathing embarrassment and blame?

How about the Department of Homeland Security this time around? Again, there were red flags and warnings. The bomber was only stopped by his own incompetence, not by our security network. Director Janet Napolitano first said the system worked — then had to admit it was a failure.

And now the underwear bomber cannot be interrogated to find and stop other bombers and terrorists because Obama has decided there is no real war on terrorism, only criminal violations that must be treated as a legal problem, giving the terrorist all the rights of the U.S. citizens he was attempting to murder. In his statement, Obama even used the term “alleged” to describe the terrorist. Somewhere, Osama bin Laden must be laughing.

A good Ralph Peters column makes other points:

Abdulmutallab’s own father warned our diplomats that his son had been infected by Islamist extremism. Our diplomats did nothing. Why? Because (despite a series of embassy bombings) the State Department dreads linking terrorism to Islam.

Contrast our political correctness with Abdulmutallab’s choice of Christmas for his intended massacre. Our troops stand down on Muslim holidays. A captive terrorist merely has to claim that a soldier dog-eared a Koran, and it’s courts-martial all around.

By now we should be getting the message as clear as jets flying into the Trade Center towers: The terrorists are detecting weakness, and they are ramping up their attacks. Pretty soon they will succeed again. And it will be Obama and his team who rolled in the wooden horse, to “make peace.”

He probably has an answer for that too — he will just blame the Bush administration, as he does with nearly everything else.

It’s beginning to look like the isolated extremists are in the White House.