Analyst's note: You simply have to see the embedded clip to believe it.
The most vexing video of 2011 may be this clip of Congressman Dan Lungren questioning Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Stockton on December 7. Though Stockton's evasiveness is in line with the government's history of not calling Islamism the enemy — recently exhibited by scrubbing FBI training materials and labeling the Fort Hood attack as "workplace violence" — his ability to twist himself into knots to avoid stating the obvious deserves special recognition:
[....]The conflict with radical Islam is fought not only by government-trained professionals in far-off lands. Violent jihad has targeted places like Little Rock and Times Square, while stealth jihad is ubiquitous. Ordinary citizens thus find themselves on the front lines and have a key role to play by looking out for potential terrorist activity and resisting nonviolent Islamists, but the feds appear determined to keep people too uninformed about the nature of the threat to be as useful as they otherwise could. Hence, even if U.S. leaders do have some grasp of Islamism, they fail Americans by not conveying basic knowledge of the enemy's ideology through untwisted words."
