"Isolated extremist" was the label President Barack Obama initially slapped on the Nigerian Muslim who flew into Detroit on Christmas Day, burning himself in a botched attempt to take down the plane with explosives sewn into his underwear.

If anyone seems isolated here, it is the U.S. president himself. For three days after the terrorist attack, Obama carried on with his Hawaii holiday, "monitoring" the situation while leaving his staff to deal with the public. When Obama finally appeared on Monday to make a statement, he gave a boilerplate nod to the potential terror connections of the "suspect," Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab: "We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable." But in the same statement he went on to say that "This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist."

At what point, in Obama's scheme of the universe, did Abdulmutallab qualify as "isolated?" By the time Obama spoke up, Abdulmutallab himself had already confessed to U.S. authorities that he'd trained with al-Qaida bomb-makers in Yemen. Weeks earlier, Abdulmutallab's father had warned U.S. officials that his son had become radicalized by Islamic extremists and might be in contact with terrorist groups. Before the attack, the name of the "suspect" was already listed in the ample company of some 400,000 likely terrorist affiliates, if not on an actual no-fly list. By the time Obama spoke, al-Qaida's Yemen franchise itself was chiming in to take credit for the Christmas airliner demolition plot.