Deep into defensive spin mode on the Christmas Day bombing plot, the Obama team is fanning out with talking points. “The system works most of the time.” Yikes. OK, there is this one: “It is only in retrospect that the clues are clear.” Yikes again. (Isn’t this why we have people looking at clues prospectively?) The worst: “There was no smoking gun.” That one set off Charles Hurt, who writes:

Of course there was “no single piece of intelligence” that spelled it out. You have to put the pieces together, genius. Anyway, we’re not talking about a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle here. This was more like one of those children’s puzzles with four giant pieces that have to be laid out of the floor, and each piece gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re looking at.

Really, do the Obami imagine that they bear no responsibility unless they get a note with the date, time, and place of the next attack, or that they only need to catch 75 percent of the plots? I suppose they can try to convince us of that, but there must be some voice of sanity cautioning against this nonsense. Right?

The Obama spinners who have descended on radio- and cable-news shows seem conflicted. They dare not defend the president’s shabby handling of the incident. The more candid of them concede he is “struggling to find the right tone,” but they plead that he’s really being treated oh so unfairly by all of these second-guessers and partisans who insist on finding out what went wrong. So the Obama supporters retreat to Napolitano-like talking points: no system is perfect, we are doing everything we can, and we have to learn to live with the inevitability of one of these bombers succeeding. (Just not on a flight with them or their loved ones, I suppose.)

It is rather cringe-inducing. Suggest that an independent commission look at this? Oh, you’ll hear howls (where were they during the Bush years?) that these commissions never really work, that creating new systems is a process fraught with unintended consequences, and it’s all a counterproductive blame game. In their book, no one should get fired, no real reforms are needed, and the real problem is all the Republican criticism.

I suspect all of this will crumble as Congress returns and hearings get under way. Democrats in Congress can’t appear to cover for the festival of incompetence or forfeit the national-security issue to the other party. At some point, even Democrats must concede that the White House spin is not only unbelievable but enormously counterproductive.

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