President Obama is like a beautiful sunrise: each morning, he astonishes anew. Except that the sunrise is beautiful, and President Obama is simply stupid.
That’s the kind gloss on Obama’s latest trip to Paris, where he has repeatedly stated that he is fighting ISIS by sitting in mahogany-paneled rooms eating delicacies with fellow world leaders and chatting about how to hamper global economic growth on behalf of environmentalist redistributionism. Speaking in Paris, Obama said that talking climate change is “an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us.”
Deter us from what? Obama said that we would build a better future, and that ISIS couldn’t stop us, as though Muslim terrorists are sitting around in Syria making nefarious plans to expend carbon, cursing the new Global Alliance Against Cow Farts. Naturally, Obama trotted out his favorite language to describe those who disagree with his agenda: they’re cynics. “One of the enemies we will be fighting at this conference is cynicism,” Obama said – and fighting cynicism will presumably be a more important task than fighting radical Muslims who wish to murder Westerners.
Leave aside Obama’s arrogance here – he was supposed to speak for three minutes and spoke for fourteen. Leave aside his pathetic apologetics for the American economy, the planetary driver for economic growth since the turn of the 20th century — Obama said he had come “personally as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second largest emitter to say the USA not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.” Focus instead on Obama’s prioritization: he believes that what he’s doing in Paris right now is of far more global importance than what he does to stop Russian aggression in the Middle East, or to stop ISIS’s terror campaign, or to stop the devolution of American global power. That’s not an aberration. That’s a fundamental part of the leftist philosophy from which he springs. As Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrote just days after the Paris massacre, “Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.”
Obama obviously agrees. During his speech, he stated, “We stand united in solidarity not only to deliver justice to the terrorist network responsible for those attacks but to protect our people and uphold the enduring values that keep us strong and keep us free. And we salute the people of Paris for insisting this crucial conference go on…What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?”
This is nonsensical to the point of madness. The goal of ISIS isn’t to “tear down our world” to their own material standard – if it were, Obama would be on their side, given his intent to do away with the two greatest engines for the alleviation of poverty in the history of civilization: capitalism and carbon based fuels. Their goal is to replace our civilization with one of their own, barbaric and cruel, theologically rooted in a shared vision of radical Islam.
President Obama doesn’t like the villain with which history has presented him, and so he’s instead crafting a villain of his own from broadcloth, a sort of alien civilization that wants to stop us from signing leftist agreements. President Obama, in viewing ISIS, is like Jackie Kennedy in viewing the assassin of her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights…it had to be some silly little Communist.” Obama feels the same way about radical Islam: the people of Paris didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed by pro-oil right-wingers. Instead, it had to be some silly little Muslim fanatics. So he’ll simply manufacture the enemies he wishes he had, and slap the label of ISIS on them. According to Obama, ISIS isn’t Islamic, but they sure as hell hate climate treaties.
Obama’s real point in Paris, of course, is exactly what the left says it is. In February, the executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change openly stated, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution…This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
Obama feels the same way. In his speech today, he said that wanted to “reaffirm our commitment that resources will be there for countries willing to do their part to skip the dirty phase of development” – as though if we just pay off poor countries to skip development, they’ll go directly to being developed countries without any of that nasty, you know, development. He said we need to “makes sure that these resources flow to the countries that need help preparing for the impacts of climate change that we can no longer avoid” – as though if we just hand cash to the world’s most impoverished countries and the world’s cruelest dictators, they’ll surely use it to relocate their populations from coastal cities sure to be swamped by unscientific concepts of climate change. And finally, he said he wanted a crony capitalist global system by which his green energy initiatives in the United States – a massive failure by any metric – are expanded worldwide.
Obama’s agenda isn’t America’s agenda in Paris. It’s the left’s agenda, which means ignoring America’s true enemies in order to bring the West down a peg. And if he has to prop up the bodies of a few dead Frenchmen to make that agenda – well, that’s just an act of defiance to the terrorists, right?
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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