OPINION:
From George Washington on, presidents have blamed “them lyin’ newspapers” for their problems, and often for the problems they create. And not just presidents; governors, mayors and even aldermen play the national political sport. The villains now include television and the Internet.
Presidents dream of drawing interviewers like Ezra Klein of Vox.com. President Obama sat down the other day with Mr. Klein and he served up one softball after another about the president’s political theories, his reading of history and his dreams. The pitcher had neither curve ball nor slider in his repertoire, and Mr. Obama duly knocked them out of the park. The president thinks the legislative filibuster should be abolished, he would amend the Constitution to limit political speech and he thinks income redistribution is a good thing “for its own sake.”
But when he dismissed concerns about violent radical Islam as a media creation, which he thinks has been hyped and doesn’t mean much, anyway, he crossed into fantasy. He compared himself to a city mayor whose job requires him to deal with crime and criminals, and the media’s eagerness to play up the deeds of the few hardly makes the problems serious. He suggests that reporters and pundits play up the violence in the Middle East for the same reason television’s Entertainment News hypes murder, mayhem and a light snowfall.
He refused again to acknowledge the connection everyone else can see plainly, the link between radical Muslims and the violence that has collapsed civil order in the Arab world, leading to the beheading of civilians, the burning of a Jordanian air force pilot and the rise of the Islamic State. He described the slaying of Jewish customers at a kosher delicatessen in Paris merely as “random killings.” The perpetrators of that massacre intended them as anything but random, but to kill as many Jews as they could, and Mr. Obama says he can’t see the connection.
This is of a piece with his total denial of what’s going on in the world, showing himself a religious partisan more concerned about Christian misdeeds of a thousand years ago than the crimes of Muslims last week. The president’s way of war is to deny that anyone is at war. He sees a few random thugs on the street, not a conscious enemy bent on the destruction of the West.
The president and his national security adviser scolded the clear-eyed folks last week for worrying about the Islamist barbarians who, in the White House view, represent neither an “existential threat” nor any other kind of threat to the United States or anyone else. Nuisances, perhaps, but not worthy of presidential concern.
Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary, doggedly followed his boss. When Jonathan Karl of ABC News persisted in asking whether the fact that Islamic gunmen killed Jews in a kosher deli could lead a reasonable man to conclude they were killing people because they were Jews the hapless Mr. Ernest, trying his best to keep a straight face, insisted the victims were shot at random because “they were not targeted by name.”
The barbarians who captured the Jordanian pilot didn’t know his name, rank and serial number, either, but they “randomly” burned him alive, anyway.
President Obama has never understood that he was elected to a real job, to deal with real world problems. He is more comfortable shooting endless rounds of golf, practicing his slam dunk and giving interviews to fawning partisans. The people who are on this planet deserve something a lot better.
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