2009 ends on another high note for the Obama administration:

1.) Horrible attempted terrorist attack fails on Christmas in Detroit.

2.) Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary proclaims, “The system worked.”

3.) Obama, who couldn’t be bothered on vacation to take a break from golfing and address the situation head-on, later has to clean up Napolitano’s mess and call it a “systemic failure.”

4.) Obama presses ahead on his plan to release Gitmo detainees:

The Obama administration is pushing back against calls to halt or delay closing the Guantanamo Bay prison in light of the failed Christmas Day terror attack, suggesting that shutting down the prison will undermine terrorist recruitment in the very network that claimed responsibility for last week’s plot.

Here’s a hint, Mr. Obama: EVERYTHING we do to combat them will be used as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda…even the stuff we DON’T do will be. Are you suggesting we stop working against them altogether? If so, please make that case.

5.) Meanwhile, the terrorists we DO release from Gitmo, return to jihad, looking to kill more Americans.

The chieftains of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) currently include at least three Gitmo alumni who have returned with a vengeance to the jihad. Said al Shihri, AQAP’s second in command, is a former Gitmo detainee who is believed to have been behind the 2008 attack on the American embassy in Sanaa. Gitmo veteran Ibrahim Rubaish is the Islamic jurisprudential authority responsible for approving AQAP terrorist operations. Muhammad Attik al-Harbi became an AQAP field commander after being released from Gitmo on the promise that he’d be rehabilitated in the Saudi re-education program — a scheme premised on the dubious notion that terrorists can be wooed away from jihad by immersion in Wahhabist principles. (Al-Harbi is reportedly back in Saudi custody, undergoing re-re-education.)

AQAP’s senior operatives also include Anwar al Awlaki, the Muslim cleric with whom Nidal Hassan consulted in the months before carrying out the Fort Hood massacre. It is entirely possible, if not likely, that at least some of the former Gitmo detainees in Yemen are complicit in the Christmas Day attack, and that they are planning similar strikes.

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UPDATE: ABC News reports that the Detroit would-be bomber was trained by ex-Gitmo detainees. Wondeful! Keep those Gitmo gates open!

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How’s that plan working out for ya, O?

Please…let’s not do anything to ANGER them!

The logic that closing Gitmo would have ANY impact — ANY! — on jihadists’ opinion of America and Americans is most certainly the biggest laugher of the year. Congrats, sir.

UPDATE: Do yourself a favor and read Byron York’s takedown of the silly argument of a double standard between how the press is handling this, versus the shoe-bomber incident during Bush’s first term. Does anyone seriously want to make the case that the press is harder on Obama than they were on Bush? Seriously?