RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nobody who watched Barack Obama’s speech Sunday night outlining his strategy to defeat Islamic State could have come away disappointed by the performance. Disappointment presupposes hope for something better. That ship sailed, and sank, a long time ago.

By now we are familiar with the cast of Mr. Obama’s mind. He does not make a case; he preaches a moral. He mistakes repetition for persuasion. He does not struggle with the direction, details or trade-offs of policy because he’s figured them all out. His policies never fail; it’s our patience that he finds wanting. He asks not what he can do for his country but what his country can do for him.

And what’s that? It is for us to see what has long been obvious to him, like an exasperated teacher explaining simple concepts to a classroom of morons. Anyone? Anyone?
That’s why nearly everything the president said last night he has said before, and in the same shopworn phrases. His four-point strategy for defeating ISIS is unchanged. His habit of telling us—and our enemies—what he isn’t going to do dates back to the earliest days of his presidency. His belief that terrorism is another gun-control issue draws on the deep wells of liberal true belief. His demand for a symbolic congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is at least a year old, though as recently as 2013 he was demanding that Congress kill the AUMF altogether. Back then he was busy boasting that al Qaeda was on a path to defeat.

President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation of “reassurance” and “resolve” on the evening of December 6th had all the substance of cotton candy. It took up a lot of space but essentially there was nothing there. It was a fluffy repeat of the same old deception, misdirection, taqiyya, and dissimulation. The only thing his fifteen-minute, nineteen-hundred word spiel reassured us of was that he wasn’t going to change his policy towards ISIS (aka ISIL) or his determination to protect Islam. Let’s examine the speech.

The first paragraph was a howler.

Good evening. On Wednesday, 14 Americans were killed as they came together to celebrate the holidays. They were taken from family and friends who loved them deeply. They were white and black, Latino and Asian, immigrants, and American born, moms and dads, daughters and sons. Each of them served their fellow citizens. All of them were part of our American family.

Actually, Obama wasn’t so much talking “with us” as he was talking down to us. Also, he failed the bean-counting test. He forgot to mention that the victims were also someone’s cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, and in-laws. But, apparently, there were no Muslims among the victims. What a relief! Well, to Obama it was a relief.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/07/daniel-greenfield-moment-migration-is-the-greatest-threat-to-national-security/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Migration is the Greatest Threat to National Security, unveiling something Obama and the Left just can’t seem to understand: It’s not the weather, it’s the terror.

Don’t miss it!

There are many popular demons in American public life: Barack Obama and his monarchical pretensions, Valerie Jarrett and her two-bit Svengali act, or, if your tastes run in the other direction, the Koch brothers, the NRA, the scheming behind-the-scenes influences of Big Whatever. But take a moment to doff your hat to the long, energetic, and wide-ranging careers of three of our most enduring bad guys: laziness, corruption, and stupidity, which deserve special recognition for their role in the recent debates over gun control, terrorism, and crime.

The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.” The Bill of Rights guarantees Americans (like it or not) the right to keep and bear arms; it also reiterates the legal doctrine of some centuries standing that government may not deprive citizens of their rights without due process. In the case of gun rights, that generally means one of two things: the legal process by which one is convicted of a felony or the legal process by which one is declared mentally incompetent, usually as a prelude to involuntary commitment into a mental facility. The no-fly list and the terrorism watch list contain no such due process. Some bureaucrat somewhere in the executive branch puts a name onto a list, and that’s that. The ACLU has rightly called this “Kafkaesque.”

Many of our political leaders from both political parties have, since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, declared, “We are fighting them (the terrorists) over there so that we won’t have to fight them over here.”

You have to question if these supposed leaders have ever studied geography. The three locations associated with the attacks of 9/11 were all inside the United States.

It is beyond delusional to not understand that this war on terror must be fought inside our borders as well as overseas. Indeed, we must also fight this war in cyberspace as well. Truly this is a war that must be fought here, there and everywhere.

We have had a succession of attempted terror attacks carried out inside the United States including the failed SUV bomb attack carried out on May 10, 2010 by Faisal Shahzad at Times Square and the deadly Boston Marathon bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers on April 15, 2013.

On December 2, 2015 Syed Rizwan Farook, reportedly a U.S.-born citizen of Pakistani parents and his immigrant wife, Tashfeen Malik carried out a horrific murderous terror attack in San Bernardino, California.

Obama began his speech with a cover-up, suggesting that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s bloody San Bernardino massacre was not the work of ISIS.

Whatever dignity his Oval Office speech was meant to convey was lost in his opening sentences as his speech became yet another effort to claim that he hadn’t made a mistake by assuring Americans they had nothing to worry about from ISIS right before its latest terror attack.

Farook and Malik were “self-radicalized”. Their attack was not part of a “broader conspiracy”. But ISIS and Al Qaeda have both embraced a strategy of empowering local supporters to carry out their own attacks by giving them the tools and strategies to do so. Malik pledged allegiance to ISIS. Farook, according to his father, was a supporter of the Islamic State. The worst terror attacks in America in recent years were carried out by these independent Islamic terror cells in support of the Jihad.

These so-called “lone wolf” attacks are part of the broader ISIS and Al Qaeda conspiracy.

Instead of leading the fight against ISIS, Obama is making excuses for his latest failures while trying to once again minimize the threat of the global terror group that he had once described as a JV team.

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.”

Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with overwhelming popular goodwill and solid majorities in both houses of Congress. He chose not to translate that political heft into passing “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open borders and amnesties) or more gun control.

He opposed gay marriage. He warned that he could not use presidential fiats to grant amnesty, close down Guantanamo, or remake the EPA in his own image. He borrowed as never before, in vain hopes of kicking-starting a natural recovery that he would soon abort through his own anti-business jawboning, more regulations, growth in government, and tax increases.

So far Obama’s legacy is a sudden crash in energy prices and an unforeseen huge expansion in U.S. oil and gas production that came despite — not because of — his efforts.

Indeed, Obama scarcely succeeded in ramming through Obamacare — and only through untruths that it would lower costs and premiums, expand coverage, and ensure continuance of existing plans and patient doctors — and then wisely quit trying to strong-arm other legislation that could have cost him the 2012 election.

President Barack Obama used a rare Oval Office address on Sunday to lay out his administration’s approach for dealing with the rising threat of domestic terrorism in the wake of last week’s San Bernardino massacre, calling for new gun control measures and tightened visa application processes, but suggesting no new military initiatives.

Mr. Obama said the attack underscores that the threat of terrorism in the U.S. “has evolved into a new phase.”
“This was an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people,” he said. “As we’ve become better at preventing complex multifaceted attacks like 9/11, terrorists turns to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society.”

The president called on Congress to pass legislation to prevent people who are on “no fly” terrorism watch lists from buying guns in the U.S., and reiterated his call for lawmakers to pass a new authorization for his administration to use force against Islamic State, or ISIS, a vote he said would “demonstrate that the American people are united, and committed, to this fight.”

In addition, Mr. Obama called for new measures to tighten national security, including a review of the visa program that one of the San Bernardino attackers used to enter the U.S. last year.