Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said President Obama “seems more intent on telling us warnings about the Crusades, criticizing America” than fighting terrorism.
Jindal, the 2016 hopeful playing the most hardball lately, emerged from a governors’ meeting with Obama at the White House yesterday to declare the president “unfit to be commander in chief.”
“I take no joy in saying that,” said Jindal, in town for the National Governors Association meeting, to reporters. “I don’t say so for partisan or ideological reasons.”
Jindal elaborated on Fox this morning, saying Obama “disqualified” himself from being fit to lead the country and its military as he “refuses to identify one of the main military threats we face by name: radical Islamic fundamentalism.”
“You listen to those quotes from his own administration. Eric Holder says, ‘We’re not at a state of war.’ You’ve got the State Department saying, ‘We’re not going to kill our way to victory,’ at a time when these barbarians, they’re beheading Christians, they’re torturing, prosecuting Christians, Muslims, Jews, other religious minorities, they are — they killed over 100 schoolchildren, they’re actually killing editorials, because they don’t like their cartoons,” he said.
The governor also cited two “fundamental mistakes” Obama makes in his authorization of military force request to Congress.
“One, he puts an arbitrary timeline, a three-year deadline in there. We know we’ll be done when we’ve hunted down and killed these terrorists, not some political deadline. And then secondly, he bars the use of ground troops,” Jindal said.
“We need to enlist our military commanders. We need to go to them and say, ‘Give us a plan to hunt down, to kill, to eradicate these terrorists.’ We don’t need a president who’s trying to appease (inaudible), trying to be politically correct. He won’t even name the enemy we face, and now he’s refusing to give our military the tools — all the tools they need to go and win this war.”
He added that the 90-minute meeting Obama held with the governors is “more of the president talking to us than a real dialogue.”
“One, the president continues to say, ‘We’re not at war with Islam.’ Well, that’s obvious. That’s obviously true. But we are at war with radical Islam, and he needs to say it. You hear other foreign leaders say it. You hear the president of Egypt, the prime minister of France say it,” Jindal continued. “And secondly, the way that we win, the way we deny them the P.R., the recruiting tool is to hunt them down and kill them.”
“These — this political correctness is just — it’s not helping anything. It’s — it’s hurting our ability to actually go and win this fight. The way we deny them the P.R. tools is hunt them down and kill them.”
Jindal said political correctness is also making Obama “pretend like we’ll never send in ground troops.”
“The reality is we have allies willing to supply ground troops, including Turkey, if this president would be serious about being there to get rid of Assad,” he said of the dictator giving haven to terrorists in return for keeping him in power. “I think there’re a lot of allies worried that if they go after ISIS, it’ll create a vacuum for Assad. It’ll create a vacuum for Iran. So there are allies willing to supply the ground troops if they thought this president were more serious.”
“…This is one of the few times I think Congress needs to give the president more than he’s asked for. I almost never say that. I think they need to give him the ability to go win this war. He hasn’t asked for enough when it comes to the ability to win this war. They should give it to him.”
Obama needled governors eyeing his job in public remarks to the group. “So I’m in the fourth quarter of my presidency, or as some of you might call it — the kickoff for your campaign season,” he said.
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