TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

In addressing the attempted airline bombing, the White House has refused to take any responsibility for the lapses in security and sharing of intelligence that allowed the bomber to board the plane.

Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, said:

“Obviously the procedures and the protocols employed in this instance are ones that we’ve inherited that had been built over the course of several years since 2003,” McDonough said.

Obama noted in his remarks on Monday that the terrorist watch list system has been “in place for many years.”

With these two comments — one explicit, the other implicit — the administration is attempting to shift responsibility for the failures to the Bush administration. This isn’t an isolated occurrence; the President and his aides have done the same thing with Iraq, Afghanistan, and the economy. It is a concerted strategy.

Shifting blame to others, as this administration has done, is an inherently political act to lessen rightful focus on the administration for the failure. It’s an abdication of the president’s responsibility, to gain political advantage.

The president is, whether he likes it or not, in charge of the government’s various agencies. He is not an outsider running for office anymore. When someone is elected president, they’re in charge. Thus, whenever there is a failure by these agencies, the president’s job isn’t to say that they, or people in the past, are to blame. Their job is to acknowledge there were failures and make every attempt to fix them.