OPINION:
President Obama can’t give up his notion that ISIS is the “junior varsity,” trying to play with the big boys and not worthy of the attention of a president of the United States. He continued Sunday night to portray the San Bernardino massacre and the expanding threat to the Middle East — and now to the world — as anything but what it is. The president finally dispensed with the goofy euphemism “workplace violence,” but insisted that his strategy is working and he will continue with it.
He seems to understand, but dimly, that the growing radical Islamic terror puts at risk his attempt to get anything done in his last year in office. But he doesn’t seem to understand that he must change how he meets the challenge. More gun control, more schemes to fix global warming and more speeches, even speeches better than the one he delivered Sunday night, won’t do it. The facts now emerging demonstrate in chilling detail how this was terrorism of the most brutal kind, despite everything the president has said.
His friends in the big media tried at first to help sell the president’s spin. Terry Saunders of NBC theorized that the shootings might have been triggered by the Muslim killers’ anger that Syed Farook’s colleagues were celebrating Christmas; Gary Tuchman of CNN asked one of the new widows whether her husband could have been “asking for it” by holding to his faith as a Messianic Jew. Tom Fuentes, a former assistant director of the FBI, speculated in the first hours after the shooting that the massacre was the work of right-wing conservatives (and probably Republicans at that).
Denial can be an inviting temptation. The president and his men (and women) can’t bear to come to grips with the reality that terrorists are at last targeting innocents inside America, thus the frantic search for a counter-explanation for why this quiet, educated, well-employed middle-class couple would so brutally turn on their friends and neighbors. The president’s rush to judgment, and the wrong judgment at that, was consistent with what he has urged in the past: Don’t blame the killer, blame the gun.
Mr. Obama’s speech Sunday night was more of the same, looking for explanations everywhere but at hand. He did not explain how and why Tashfeen Malik was not more carefully vetted by the Department of Homeland Security before she was allowed to enter the country, though the place she gave as her birthplace does not exist. She and her husband have traveled several times to Saudi Arabia and communicated with a known notorious terrorist. Should not that have raised a flag?
The president trifled with the truth when he insisted there is no evidence so far of the San Bernardino killers’ ties to the international terrorist conspiracy, but that assurance is dissolving as more is learned about who the killers are, what they knew, and when they did know it.
If the president meant to reassure us on Sunday night, he failed. He speaks only as the scold, rebuking and reproving anyone who doesn’t understand that his strategy is the right one. He continues to speak from the head, with reproof and impatience, when what everyone wants to hear is something from the heart. This was not Franklin D. Roosevelt with a fireside chat to encourage and reassure, nor Ronald Reagan vowing righteous vengeance upon the wicked. America expected a little presidential anger on Sunday night, and got soft and squishy platitudes.
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