You’ll remember this scene from Jurassic Park. Direct from the script:

Grant charges across the compound, a fire in his eyes, ahead of ELLIE, MALCOLM, and GENNARO. HAMMOND struggles to keep up.

HAMMOND Dr. Grant, Dr. Grant? Uh – -we planned to show you the raptors later, after lunch.

But Grant has stopped abruptly next to the Velociraptor pen, which we recognize as the heavily fortified cage we some earlier, which the San Quentin towers at one end.

Grant stands right up against the fence, eyes wide, dying for a glimpse.

HAMMOND catches up, slightly out of breath.

HAMMOND (cont’d) Dr. Grant – - as I was saying, we’ve laid out lunch for you before you head out into the park. Alejandro, our gourmet chef – -

GRANT What are they doing?

As they watch, a giant crane lowers something large down into the middle of the jungle foliage inside the pen. Something very large.

It’s a steer. They poor thing looks disconcerted as hell, helpless its in a harness, flailing its legs in the air.

HAMMOND Feeding them. (moving along) Alejandro is preparing a delightful meal for us. A Chilean sea bass, I believe. Shall we?

Grant goes up to the viewing deck. The others follow, staring as the steer disappears into the shroud of foliage. The line from the crane hangs for a moment.

The jungle seems to grow very quiet. They all stare at the motionless crane line. It jerks suddenly, like a fishing pole finally getting a nibble. There’s a pause – -

- – and then a frenzy. The line jerks every which way, the jungle plants sway and SNAP from some frantic activity within, there is a cacophony of GROWLING, of SNAPPING, of wet CRUNCHES that mean the steer is literally being torn to pieces and is almost makes it worse that we can’t see anything of what’s going on – -

- – and then it’s quiet again. The line jerks a few times, then stops. Slowly the SOUND of the jungle starts up again.

HAMMOND Fascinating animals, fascinating.

ELLIE Oh my God.

HAMMOND Give time, they’ll out draw the T-rex. Guarantee it.

GRANT I want to see them. Can we get closer?

Ellie puts a hand on his arm, like calming an overexcited child.

ELLIE Alan, these aren’t bones anymore.

HAMMOND We’re – - still perfecting a viewing system. The raptors seem to be a bit resistant to integration into a park setting.

A VOICE comes from behind them.

VOICE (O.S.) They should all be destroyed.

They turn and look at the man who spoke. ROBERT MULDOON, the grim-faced man who was present at the accident in the beginning, is fortyish, British.

He joins them and takes his hat off. When Muldoon talks, you listen.

HAMMOND Robert. Robert Muldoon, my game warden from Kenya. Bit of an alarmist, I’m afraid, But he’s dealt with the raptors more than anyone.

GRANT (introducing himself) Alan Grant. Tell me, what kind of metabolism do they have? What’s their growth rate? (or) rate of growth.

MULDOON They’re lethal at eight months. And I do lethal. I’ve hunted most things that can hunt you, but the way these things move – -

GRANT Fast for biped?

MULDOON Cheetah speed. Fifty, sixty miles per hour if they ever got out in the open. And they’re astonishing jumpers.

HAMMOND Yes, yes, yes, which is why we take extreme precautions. They viewing area below us will have eight-inch tempered glass set in reinforced steel frames to – -

GRANT Do they show intelligence? With the brain cavity like theirs we assumed – -

MULDOON They show extreme intelligence, even problem solving. Especially the big one. We bred eight originally, but when she came in, she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one – -when she looks at you, you can see she’s thinking (or) working things out. She’s the reason we have to feed ‘em like this. She had them all attacking the fences when the feeders came.

MULDOON That’s right. But they never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses. Systematically. They remembered.

Behind them, the crane WHIRRS back to life, raising the cable back up out of the raptor pen. The guest turn and stare as the end portion of the cable becomes visible. The steer has been dragged completely away, leaving only the tattered, bloody harness.

Hammond claps his hands together excitedly.

HAMMOND Who’s hungry? After you, my dear.

What does this have to do with anything? Read on.

Every since Barack Obama was elected with a pledge to change the conversation so Islamic fascists would not hate us anymore, we’ve seen Al Qaeda probing the fence.

Touching the Fence Line

In Little Rock, Arkansas, a muslim under investigation after returning from Yemen gunned down army recruiters.

On July 25, 2009, in Denver, CO, an Afghan-American went into a beauty supply store to beginsoldier building a bomb to blow up New York. Again.

In Ft. Hood, Texas, a solider gunned down his fellow soldiers after having had a stint in Yemen.

In New York City, an empty van sat for two days with forged law enforcement documents. We know very little else about the incident.

In the air over Detriot, MI, a Nigeria trained in Yemen tried to blow up the plane. He appears to have been helped get on the plane in Amsterdam without a passport. The passengers on the plane saw another man arrested when they landed in Detriot, but the authorities first denied it then said it was someone from a different flight. The passengers dispute this.

Then we had the attack on the CIA in Afghanistan by the soldier ranked highly enough to get to them without pre-screening.

Yemen warns of hundreds more.

This is all in the last six months or so. The frequency of the probing and testing has accelerated. What must they be planning?

“Isolated Extremists”

The media and the President skirted the issue of terrorism in Little Rock, AR. The word was not used. The religion of the attacker was dodged. Barack Obama and his administration refused to deal honestly with what happened.

We never heard a peep about the Denver, CO guy.

In Ft. Hood, TX the same thing happened. Terrorism? Nah. Islamic extremist? Nah. It was Bush’s fault. The guy was under post traumatic stress disorder. That’s all. Ignore the radicalized cleric we blew up in Yemeni under whom the shooter studied.

Who knows about the van in New York. It could have been a random incident, but given the forged documents, etc. it must make you wonder. Unfortunately, we can be sure the administration is not wondering.

Then there is the Detroit bound flight. Barack Obama described the man as an “isolated extremist.”

We’ll wait and see what Obama does about the CIA attack, but I am not hopeful and an agency employee I’ve talked to feel the same way.

Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security will not call terrorism “terrorism.” To her, it is all man-made “incidents.” Obama himself does not like to refer to terrorism — his administration says that is a tactic and we are not at war with a tactic. Barack Obama says we are at war with Al Qaeda, a group this same administration and those it listens to say is a diminished threat.

In fact, the voices the administration reveres are more and more looking to be the scholarly ivory tower fools who saw communist as no threat.

From Fareed Zakaria:

It is by now overwhelmingly clear that Al Qaeda and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization’s ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an “existential threat” to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al Qaeda and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself.

The evidence supporting this view of the threat was already growing by 2003. Scholars like Benjamin Friedman, Marc Sageman and John Mueller collected much of it. I’ve been making a similar case in columns and a book since 2004. James Fallows wrote a fine cover essay in The Atlantic in September 2006 arguing that if there was ever a war against militant Islam, it was now over and the latter had lost.

No base of operations? What is Yemen? No territory? What is Amsterdam, Somalia, London, and Yemen? Limited funding? What is Iran, but a bank account? And let’s not forget that we have separated the Taliban from Al Qaeda. That gives Al Qaeda another safe haven.

The willfully naive fools who work in and advise this administration are going to get us all killed.

3. The Muted Response

What Al Qaeda is seeing is exactly what any child or adult sees when repeatedly warned and never bothered — this American President is all bark and no bite. Without his teleprompter, he is nothing.

The CIA agents who work in the shadows and the troops in the field talk about Barack Obama in private moments with derision and ridicule. He is a joke to them.

Al Qaeda isn’t dumb. The network of terrorists can perceive this and hear the limp wristed responses coming from an academic who grew up with Al Qaeda’s ilk and thinks because he has that common tie he knows them. Coupled with the arrogance of the ivory tower academic that prevents Obama from putting anyone in charge he perceived as smarter than himself, the fence probing from Al Qaeda’s raptors will continue.

As I have asked before and then again, let me ask another time: how many Americans will die because of Barack Obama’s weak leadership?

Something wicked this way comes and I have no faith these amateurs in office will be prepared for it.