March against Charlie Hebdo magazine terrorism attack, on January 7th, 2015, in front of French Embassy in Berlin, Germany. (Photo conejota/Shutterstock.com)
Forget the economy, forget education, forget even Obamacare. All politics is local, as Tip O’Neill famously said. And there’s nothing more local than a crazed jihadi aiming an AK-47 at your head and splattering said head against the wall and through the window.
The last few days should remind us of that. And if you don’t think what happened in Paris can happen here, you’re out of your bloomin’ mind. It already has, as everybody knows, and the chances are about 99.9999% it will again. (We could be hit by an asteroid instead, saving us from the jihadis.)
Meanwhile, under the watch of the man who masquerades under the moniker of president of the United States, someone who can barely muster a dopey three-minute speech filled with banalities about the killings in France, radical Islam has metastasized across the world in a manner only dreamed of on 9/11. A map on Gretawire shows terror networks cutting a wide swathe across the planet, from South America through North Africa on to the Indian subcontinent and then into South-East Asia. In a sense the map should already include Western Europe, the way things are going.
And most likely things are going to get worse. Al Qaeda (operating with impunity in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere) and ISIS (with a state of its own the size of Indiana) are in a pissing contest for terrorist maniacs of the year while Boko Haram is doing its best to exterminate everyone in Nigeria, and apparently succeeding — all in the name of Allah. And our president never uses the word “Islamic” or acknowledges that we are at war — even though, quite obviously, the Islamists are at war with us and with Western civilization. And they seem just to be getting started. Only the morally narcissistic buffoons at the New York Times would think otherwise.
Which brings us to the 2016 presidential election. I have written before, “We need a wartime consigliere.” (Yes, yes, I know the consigliere isn’t the boss — but you get the reference.) We need a wartime president. Hillary Clinton, obviously, is as far from that as you could get, except for Barack Obama. So we have to look on the Republican side.
I’m not prepared to comment on any of the candidates now. I don’t know enough. But I will say this: In this time of war, I will be looking, far above all things, for the best possible commander-in-chief, man or woman. Put another way, how much does the person resemble Winston Churchill, the ultimate wartime leader, in my view? That’s not an easy thing. Churchill had a great verbal skill and certain unique charm that could inspire people. I can’t immediately think of anyone who has that. But Churchill was a figure of legend, someone even the oldest of us see from afar or on old news clips. In his day, we know he was reviled by many.
So maybe someone will emerge. We are in desperate need of that person after the last six, soon to be eight, years. What has been lost domestically is certainly significant, but pales in comparison to the global situation and the religious war that we are in. If America continues to lead from behind after 2016, it will cease to be America. The world will shortly be in chaos and we will all be back in the Middle Ages. Sound excessive? I wish it did.
So I implore those of you reading to put aside your special interests for the moment, or at least soft-pedal them. Most of them can wait and if we lose the war against Islamic terrorism, which, believe it or not, we are currently losing, they will all be irrelevant, the unread text of Obamacare buried in the sand like Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. Civilizations have died before. Let’s not let it be ours. Let’s overcome the reactionary leaders in our own country and in Europe, who suffer from such extreme cognitive disorders that even after #CharlieHebdo they insist on delinking Islam from terrorism. Let’s find our Churchill — and now.
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