Monday, December 7, 2015

Obama Flails, and Fails Again

Twas the first night of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, and President Obama thought that it was just the right time to address the nation about the virtues of a religion many of whose practitioners despise and want to kill Jews.

The optics were chilling.

Obviously, the president did not want to be doing what he was doing. He would have much preferred to be chumming it up with his Hollywood pals at the Kennedy Center. One suspects that he resented the fact that the speech forced him to be late for the ceremonies.

But, events in San Bernardino, coupled with his mealy-mouthed response to the terrorist massacre in Paris forced his hand. His political allies were gnashing their teeth, so Obama was forced to take one for the team. He stood behind a podium and recited his lines, with neither conviction nor courage. It’s almost as though the famous rhetorician has morphed into a master of empty rhetoric.

Having assured the nation a mere few weeks ago that no one was at any risk for an attack by ISIS Obama was caught flat-footed when a couple of ISIS sympathizers and Jew haters massacred fourteen of their co-workers at a Christmas party in California. For now, the president assured us, we have no evidence that the killers had been ordered to do what they did by the powers-that-be in Raqqa, but still, they did pledge allegiance to ISIS and must have received money from somewhere.

Strictly speaking, we do not know who paid these terrorists, but the president did manage to manifest his own special fear of Islam by never declaring that the terrorists were acting in the name of Islam.

Worse yet, the president’s remarks were at stark variance from the analysis provided by his own intelligence services. But, facts be damned, President Obama declared that he did have a strategy and that it was working.

For the most current intelligence assessment of ISIS, read the report filed by Kimberly Dozier:

A new U.S. intelligence report on ISIS, commissioned by the White House, predicts that the self-proclaimed Islamic State will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials told The Daily Beast.

The report stands in stark contrast to earlier White House assurances that ISIS had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria. And it is already spurring changes in how the U.S. grapples with ISIS, these officials said. 

It’s also a tacit admission that coalition efforts so far—dropping thousands of bombs and deploying 3,500 U.S. troops as well as other coalition trainers—have been outpaced by ISIS’s ability to expand and attract new followers, even as the yearlong coalition air campaign has helped local forces drive ISIS out of parts of Iraq and Syria. 

So, Obama reviewed this report and concluded that we were winning. He must know that his flunkies believe that his is the word of God—which one, we do not know—and that if he says it, it must be true. The other possibility is that he believes that he needs merely to utter the magic words that we are winning and we will be winning. Reality would never have the nerve to contradict his declamations.

Obama also made it seem as though American air power had degraded ISIS. He suggested that France, Great Britain and Germany were following the American lead in the war against ISIS. Everyone knows that this is nonsense, but Obama probably believes it anyway.

To defend his strategy, Obama set up an alternative straw man strategy. He uses this rhetorical ploy often enough. It must be working, or else he would not continue to use it. Here, he suggested that the alternative to his strategy was to invade and occupy Iraq and Syria. Since his pusillanimous withdrawal from Iraq and his inability to negotiate an agreement whereby he could keep thousands of American troops in the nation opened the region to ISIS, he declared that he did not want to send in troops because that was what ISIS wanted.

[For the record, Obama and his flunkies are the only people in the world who call ISIS … ISIL. Why does he insist on saying that the Islamic state exists, not in Iraq and Syria, but in the Levant? One reason might be that the Levant comprises the territory now knows as Israel. Just a thought.]

There are many alternatives to the Obama strategy, but the president believes that the only options are his or a calamitous mistake. Obama must imagine that his followers will believe anything he says.

Where Freud worried about what women want, Obama is apparently designing his policy to ensure that we do not do what ISIS wants.

Note Obama’s phrasing:


We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want. 

And,

We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.

And,

It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.

Since no one is proposing a ground war anyway, Obama’s argument is a straw man. One suspects that he refuses to allow our bombs to level their cities or, until recently, disrupt their oil trafficking, because ISIS wants us to level their cities and disrupt their oil trafficking. He believes that the souls of the dead terrorists will rise up from the rubble and use their loss as a great recruiting tool.

Were we to take the question seriously, we know that ISIS really wants the West to respect Islam. It wants the West to be afraid of Islam. It wants Islam to be seen as so powerful that prophet cannot be slandered with impunity. On that score Obama is giving ISIS exactly what it wants.

Or, as Obama said in Cairo in 2009:

The future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

The fact is, Obama is afraid to slander Islam. He is afraid to blaspheme the prophet of Islam. And he is afraid to see that Islam is the problem. If anyone knew the correct meaning of the word Islamophobia, he would know that the term refers to fear, not hatred. On that he is leading the world.

As for the Muslim terrorists, we are not talking about a psychotic who open fire at a clinic or a school or a movie theatre. We are talking about an international death cult-- as the president correctly called it-- that has arisen out of one and only one religion. If you cannot explain why hundreds of millions of Muslims sympathize with ISIS and with Islamist terrorism, why they want to live in under Shariah law in a caliphate and want Israel eradicated, then you are blowing smoke.

Obama was correct to say that Muslims around the world should root out Islamist terrorists. And yet, one suspects that the terrorist message resonates too well with too many Muslims for this to happen easily and without carnage.

More importantly, perhaps, it is incumbent on Muslims in the West to assimilate, to become part of their local cultures, to renounce Shariah law and to embrace Western customs and laws. A religion whose non-terrorists believe in the subjugation and suppression of women, who believe in wife beating, who believe in honor killing, who stone adulterers, who execute homosexuals and who believe that their religion can only be proselytized by holy wars has a certain affinity with the horrors of ISIS.

One fears that it will never happen if Muslims have defenders in the person of the president of the United States. You can say all you want about how well or poorly Muslims are treated in America—and there has been no outbreak of anti-Muslim violence in America, even after 9/11—but you should not pretend that the actions of ISIS and its hundreds of millions of followers and sympathizers have nothing to do with Islam. If a couple of random Muslims living in California can, upon becoming more religious, turn into bloodthirsty terrorists, there is clearly something wrong with the religion.

I will repeat a point I have made a couple of times before. A president who is worried about the possibility that someone will speak blasphemy against the prophet of Islam is systematically ignoring the hate being preached at mosques around America and the world. Are all of those hate preachers not true Muslims either?

Listening to Obama you would think that the real problem was people speaking ill of Muslims. You would think that if only people stopped thinking bad thoughts about Islam, the whole problem would go away. It's like saying that the problem in the Middle East is not Islamic terrorism, but the existence of the state of Israel.

One hastens to mention, if only in passing, that last night Obama also called for stricter gun control. Naturally, when terrorists live in a state that has the strict gun control laws that Obama favors, when they build pipe bombs in their living room, the only conclusion you can draw is that we need more gun control laws. Everyone but Obama knows, as we saw in Paris, that the world’s strictest gun control laws do not prevent terrorists from finding all the weapons they want.

In this Obama was obviously playing the politics card and trying to blame Republicans for the carnage. Obama tends to save his fire for his true enemy, Republicans and people with guns.

It’s becoming so empty that no one is paying attention any more. But, even without knowing anything about Freud, you can figure out that guns have a special affinity with a certain sexual organ, one that most feminists lack. Thus, no war against Islam, but a war against the patriarchy, against those sick and perverted beings called men.

But, the news is not all bad. From now on our combat units, the ones we are not going to send into battle, will be coed. If that does not strike fear in the souls of all incipient terrorists, I don’t know what will.


12 comments:

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Stuart, your tone and language about our president (and his flunkies) is getting more edgy. I like it.

How else does one respond to the absurd? I've had it with President Barack Hussein Obama. He should've gone to the Kennedy Center early last night. He did himself (first, always) and the nation not a lick of service in standing behind the presidential podium (FYI: they're all bullet-proof) in HIS OWN OFFICE. I feel safer... anyone?

The blood hadn't stopped flowing in San Bernardino, and our president is calling for "common sense" gun safety. Sounds to me like common sense is to let more commoners buy guns. But not in Obama's world, where the Democrat Party base is terrified of guns, yet commits most of the gun crime. Make sense of that one.

We absolutely cannot, must not, should not compromise our values and take some of the edge off violent movies or video games, because that is free speech and the right to free expression is covered by the First Amendment to the Constitution that our president supposedly taught at the law school level. As long as you don't say anything "hateful" against Muslims, you can keep your free speech, according to AG Loretta Lynch. Feel safer?

Yet in the next breath our president claims we simultaneously can, must and should compromise our values and prevent law-abiding American citizens from defending themselves under aegis of the Second Amendment. This just in: Second Amendment is the one that goes after the First Amendment. The Framers chose to put it second in line. Wonder why? Well, it has nothing whatsoever to do with duck hunting, killing bambi, squirrel soup or otherwise harvesting American forests for food. It has to do with the individual's right to defend himself and his family from barbarians... whether foreign or domestic. If that makes me a kook, let me know how you do when the $%@# hits the fan and you call 911 for help. You'll have to wait.

Would armed people have stopped the slayings in San Bernardino? I believe they would've reduced the body count and hospital admissions. Do we want people walking around toting guns? Well, if people have concealed pistol licenses, and they go through that screening and training to obtain one, then I say yes. Until we have an Administration that protects citizens instead of rambunctious activists, or until we secure our border, or until we protect our urban citizens (like those in Chicago) from criminal gun violence, then I say any discussion about the Second Amendment is a non-starter. Criminals don't have registered weapons and don't lawfully obtain CPLs. They just do whatever they want to do, and our president is more concerned about their rights than yours.

Cont'd below...

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Cont'd from above...

I am a proud American citizen, and I am armed. I have ammunition in my house. Lots of it. I have a host of weapons at my disposal. I enjoy shooting. I find it as fun as people find golf. I have every right to own my firearms. Obama's surrounded by plenty of people with firearms. Let him issue an executive order unilaterally disarm the Secret Service and then see how things go. It's easy to be a critic when your life is an ideological fantasy world. Guns are operated by human beings. They are inanimate objects. The root of any gun crime or lunatic gun violence is a criminal or a lunatic. Period. End of story. Gun control is the singularly worst, most stupid issue in the world, because the only people impacted by the law are the ones who follow it: law-abiding citizens. If you're scared of guns, you're ignorant about them, and your ignorance leaves you paralyzed with fear at a contraption -- a machine -- that is no more complicated than your dishwasher. Grow up! If you're scared of bad people with guns, join the club. I am, too. But do something about it! Don't tell legal gun owners that we're weirdos or we're somehow destroying society. You're doing that quite well living in la-la land where all you see are Islamists, illegal aliens and drug dealers who need therapy... where they're merely "misunderstood," where they need to talk. Well, you can't listen when you're dead!

A little education to those who are terrified of "assault weapons." That is a demonization of a perfectly logical and well-designed machine called a rifle. These "powerful weapons" (the president's words) are RIFLES. They operate just like any other rifle. They are merely designed for a military purpose in terms of their function: durability and design. They don't fire any more powerfully. Obama talks to us like we're idiot children. I find the idiot children these days are the people who are so afraid of guns, but never fired one. That's ignorance. My rights should not be infringed because of your ignorance.

Gun stores have been overrun with people buying guns because of all these stupid things Obama says. The day of Sandy Hook, when Obama went to the podium and says "we have to do something" with "common-sense gun safety," one of the stores I frequent sold every single firearm SKU in their inventory, and all their ammunition... in every caliber. Gone. Every time Obama talks about this issue, people get scared and buy guns. Because they know he'll do something, and the Republicans will do nothing to stop him.

A clear majority of the American people does not trust President Obama to protect us... at home or abroad. He has effectively told us we're on our own. So we do what red-blooded patriotic Americans do: we're taking things into our own hands. The volume of gun sales is a quantitative indictment -- a lagging indicator -- of his abject failure to lead this nation in a unitive, purposeful way.

Mr. President, if you want gun sales to go down, do your job, sir!

Scullman said...

God forbid someone even think ill of the Prophet, or Islam, according to our President. We just can't have it.

Immerse a crucifix with an image of Jesus Christ on it, in a glass jar full of some guys piss, and it's art. Protected speech.

Here's my idea of art: a smoking hole where Mecca and Medina used to be. You want a fucking war? You got it.

Anonymous said...

Attention: No one from law enforcement has interviewed the wife of the "Messianic Jew" that Ares Olympus highlights in previous posts. Some motive. What a joke... like most of what the Olympian One drivels. -$$$

Anonymous said...

"Piss Christ" is art, and thus not a legitimate motive for Christian homicidal upset, but Islam being called names by a Messianic Jew Ina cubicle farm is possible justification for Islamist homicidal response. Why do they hate us? Who gives a shit? They don't have to own any tie-in? An exemption from all immigration stereotypes? We can stop that? What a great deal... why don't we have all Muslims move here? Even after generations of Irish immigration, people wonder whether we're still all drunks. -$$$

Ares Olympus said...

A lot of excellent contempt in this blog entry. It's a fun sport.

And we know Hillary will be the new Iron Lady when she's elected, and she won't bow in respect to Islam like Barack Hussein Obama.

And if Hillary fails to get elected, Trump will protect us even better, willing to ban 1.3 billion people from our great country, to keep us safe from the bad guys. And even Jeb has endorsed Trump as a better presidential candidate than Hillary.

And once we stop Muslims from entering, how long can it be before we evict the Muslims who are already here? After all, Syed Rizwan Farook was born here, so how can we ever be safe from our past mistakes?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/12/07/donald-trump-muslims-united-states/76942932/

Once all the Muslims are gone, once all the Mexicans are deported, once the walls are built and properlty guarded then we can safely allow every noncriminal citizen a right to unlimited military style assault weapons, to protects us all from the federal government.

Well, there's still the black problem, but if they all have nonviolent drug felony charges on their record, they won't be able to have guns, and we can feel safe from them too.

Scullman said...

What's really sad is the understanding that because we currently have a bigger pussy for President, than Hillary could ever be, we can't turn Raqqa, Syria into a smoking parking lot, and eviscerate the rest of these ISIS assholes before next Sunday's NFL games begin.

Dennis said...

When I was stationed in SEA from 1968 to 1970 I had to learn how to effectively utilize the money I could make since I sent almost everything I made to support my wife an children. I lived basically on TDY, which was a late percentage of what I made, hazardous duty and combat pay and money I made playing the slots. One of the things that made life easier was the fact that one "haggles" for everything or one is considered a fool by most local populations if they pay the quoted price. A sort of a primer in "The Art of the Deal" so to speak.
One learned that the seller would start out with a ridiculous high price for the item, idea, being sold and the buyer started out at a ridiculous low price and the haggling would proceed from there until a comprise was reach that made both parties happy or at least satisfied with the deal. It was, in many ways fun and instructive as well.
When we have a person who is haggling, negotiating, for the American people who accepts and reenforces the price American have to pay then we the people always wind up paying more in lives and treasure for every step forward which leads to two or three steps backwards. Obama has yet to make a deal that was in America's interest. What if we had a president who, like Ronald Reagan who knew "Star Wars" was not viable, started out from a position of strength even to the point of knowing that his positions over blown? Think of the compromises that are now possible because there is a far larger leeway to bargain within.
As much as I right at this moment do not think that Trump is the person to be president he is playing some of the smartest politics I have seen in my lifetime. He is making the media, other politicians, especially people like AQ, et al look bad by over reacting at the same time as he gains more people to his camp. I note that even Chuck Schemer is smart enough to keep Trump's money.
For your interests: http://www.redstate.com/2015/12/07/this-is-a-brilliant-move-by-donald-trump/

There are times when I cannot help from laughing at AO because he does not see past the things in front of him, but he is representative of the education system that produced him.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

The only problem with this brilliant move is that it allowed the media to ignore the pathetic speech that Obama made the night before. And if it's all so brilliant how is it that Hillary Clinton is leading all the Republican candidates in the polls today, Trump by the most. And how does it happen that the people trust her more on dealing with terrorism than they trust the Republicans?

Anonymous said...

In case anyone needs any satirical relief from our President' blathering:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.ca/2015/12/a-date-that-will-live-forever-in-infamy.html?m=1

Anonymous said...

Barack Hussein Obama: the ultimate gun salesman:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/stunning-over-100-million-guns-sold-in-us-since-obama-became-president-video/

Marsh said...

She's not leading Trump in the latest poll. They are tied. Does that change your opinion of Trump now, Stuart?