Even Democrat cheerleader Dana Milbank finds Barack Obama’s happy talk on terrorism unnerving.
[T]he day Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” — Obama delivered a very different message when he spoke to donors at a fundraiser in New York’s Westchester County. “Yes, the Middle East is challenging, but the truth is it’s been challenging for quite a while,” he said. “I promise you things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago or 30 years ago. This is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.”
Speaking to another group of contributors that same day in Newport, R.I.,the president said that the post-9/11 security apparatus “makes us in the here and now pretty safe” and that the threat from ISIS “doesn’t immediately threaten the homeland.”
I hope Obama’s chillax message turns out to be correct, but the happy talk is not reassuring. It’s probably true that the threat of domestic radicalization is greater in Europe than in the United States (hence the British plan to confiscate some passports) but Obama’s sanguinity is jarring compared to the mood of NATO allies Obama is meeting in Europe this week.
Hope is not a plan.
Obama has been giving Americans a pep talk, essentially counseling them not to let international turmoil get in the way of the domestic economic recovery. “The world has always been messy,” he said Friday. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”
The terrorists use social media to organize, to recruit and to broadcast their gore porn videos.
Even Milbank isn’t buying Obama’s social media nonsense.
So we wouldn’t have fussed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if not for Facebook? Or worried about terrorists taking over much of Syria and Iraq if not for Twitter? This explanation, following Obama’s indiscrete admission Thursday that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for military action against ISIS, adds to the impression that Obama is disengaged.
In short, Americans would worry less if Obama worried more.
Indeed. Instead, Obama offers happy talk while — as he surely knows — the border is unsecured and ISIS is threatening to strike here. They’re capable of striking here. The only question is when they will attempt to strike here.
Obama’s happy talk is all kinds of unsettling, especially when lined up against his clear distaste for Israel’s self-defense against Hamas. He is either so stubborn about sticking to his “I ended the war in Iraq” line that he is ignoring the present reality, or he has checked out of the job, or he still believes somehow that his election still has chance of bringing about peace all by itself, or, and this is truly unsettling, Obama truly does not believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and similarly aligned groups are a threat because they don’t wear the al Qaeda brand.
Or he’s truly and deeply clueless and incapable of leading anything more than a partisan fundraiser or airstrikes. Or he’s on the other side, or at least far more tolerant of Islamism than any American president ought to be.
That’s a lot of possibilities, none of them good. But hey, be happy America. If you like your head, you can keep it.
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