Today Politico Arena asks:

Should officials be talking about the Christmas-day bomber talking and what does it prove?

My response:

Amid growing bipartisan criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the Christmas Day bombing, the Manhattan KSM trial, and much else in its approach to terrorism, it’s pretty clear that the White House put out the news last evening that Abdulmutallab is now talking simply to quiet that criticism. After all, that’s a story only because Abdulmutallab had not been talking. And why wasn’t he talking? Because shortly after he was arrested and briefly questioned by agents with no terrorism-related expertise, he was Mirandized and lawyered up, like any common criminal — consistent with the Obama administration’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism. And so he clammed up — and we were now put in the unseemly position of having to bargain with him to get intelligence. If this issue were not so serious, you’d have to call the Obama-Holder operation the Keystone Cops.