A reader points out that at yesterday's White House meeting of the national security muckety-mucks, not one in the illustrious assembly did a thing to secure the nation on Times Square Bomber Day, at least not until after a couple of street vendors named Duane Jackson and Lance Orton (above) noticed smoke coming out of what turned out to be the car bomb. Why? Because they, and the rest of our elites, can't, don't, and don't want to see the national threat.

This week's syndicated column:

There were some big losers in the national guessing game over the identity of the failed Times Square bomber this week. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the booby prize for picking "someone who doesn't like the healthcare bill or something."

That was before Pakistani-born, 2009-naturalized Faisal Shahzad was apprehended Sunday night trying to flee to Dubai. Even after that point, Democratic strategist Bob Beckel was holding out for "a right-wing militia man," while an array of MSM commentators, tracked by Newsbusters.com, seized on jihad-alternate theories as the trigger. One favorite: Foreclosure Rage. It seems, as the AP noted, Shahzad ran out on his home mortgage when he abandoned "the path to respectability." Of course, that was when he also chose the path to jihad, not that the media would go there. Instead, the early narrative dwelled on the "suburban" family man who had lost his home -- a two-story, grayish brown colonial, we gratuitously learned. "One would have to imagine that that brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family," said CNN's Jim Acosta.

One sure would, but only if "one" had remained blind to advancing global Islamization, eight-plus years and 15,247 acts of Islamic terrorism (as tallied by thereligionofpeace.com) since 9/11, and therefore to the possibility that Shahzad, who received five months of weapons training in Pakistan before assembling his car bomb, might be part of it. But no. Indeed, "there was a part of me that was hoping (the Times Square bomber) was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country," said MSNBC host Contessa Brewer. Of course, she inadvertently revealed there was a part of her that strongly suspected otherwise.

But that tiny voice of reason, Brewer and her peers seem to believe, is from the dark side. Brewer explains: "There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent" -- jihad! -- "to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way" -- people who believe in jihad! -- "or come from certain countries" -- that is, countries that practice Sharia and promote jihad! -- "or whose skin color is a certain way." This last bit, a non-applicable race card, works like a last-ditch sympathy-trigger. "I mean," she said, "they use it for justification for really outdated bigotry."

Welcome to your world, where self-defense is bigotry, and thus worse than death by fireball, axe or vaporizing over the Atlantic.

This is as ridiculous as it is obscene. There is no "bigotry" in understanding jihad as the engine of Islamic supremacism driven by the imperative to spread Islamic law (Sharia). Our leading lights shrink from this basic truth lest its clean logic wither the fuzzy, cultural-relativism-based universalism that orders our society.

If our leaders faced facts, you see, they might also have to act. They might have to consider such measures as halting Islamic immigration to stop the demographic spread of Sharia. Even a wartime immigration moratorium would help. Come to think of it, a simple ban on return travel from especially fertile jihad regions such as Pakistan -- a ban on return travel from the Northwest frontier alone -- would do wonders to shore up our vulnerabilities.

In Pakistan, after all, 79 percent of the people, according to a 2007 survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org, favor the "strict application of Sharia." Notorious jihadists have traveled to Pakistan for terrorism training, including lucky-for-us failures Shahzad, subway bomber Najibullah Zazi (also two high school classmates), and David Coleman Headley, implicated in an assassination plot against cartoonist Kurt Westergaard also targeting Jyllands Posten newspaper. Jihadists who trained in Pakistan have also killed and maimed scores of innocents in Mumbai and in the London Underground.

Our leaders haven't noticed. They stay riveted on their own navels, devising higher-tech ways to stare into the navels of rest of us. Post-Shahzad, AFP reports, New York City officials plan to expand a "controversial security blanket of cameras, sensors and analytical software" into midtown Manhattan. The New York Times notes cutting-edge research in pixel conversion that promises to enhance the readability of security cameras. Meanwhile, the advice of a terrorism expert such as Richard A. Clarke is summed up in the following Times subhead: "Don't Panic, Get Used to It."

Is there anyone left with America's interests at heart?