President Obama’s decision to suddenly address the country from the Oval Office tonight for only the third time is in part a belated realization that he and his party have lost touch with the country on terrorism.
The initial response by Obama and other Democrats to recent terror attacks was listless and inexplicable. Obama termed the Paris massacre a mere “setback” and continued to claim that climate change was a greater threat, and he also has steadfastly refused to identify “radical Islamic terrorism” as the enemy in the war on terror. Instead, his first instinct was to call for more gun control: “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern of mass shootings that have no parallel anywhere in the world.” That is an obvious lie in the wake of recent terror incidents around the world from Paris to Mali.
For her part, Hillary Clinton also called for more gun control, before she finally acknowledged that perhaps the U.S. visa-screening program needed “a hard look.”