“California Attack Has U.S. Rethinking Strategy on Homegrown Terror,” read the Saturday headline at the New York Times. Like everything else Barack Obama’s administration does, it’s nothing but media spin.
Nothing is changing in any meaningful way. It can’t, because Barack Obama is incapable of admitting error. That’s what puts American lives in danger, at home and abroad, every minute he remains in office, and every minute Hillary Clinton is a serious threat to inflict his third term on the United States.
The Times goes to hilarious lengths to make Obama look like less of a dangerous failure, in a string of paragraphs difficult to read without barking with laughter, and checking on the prices at your local purveyor of self-defense hardware:
The day before Thanksgiving, President Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came an explosion of gunfire and the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001.
What may be most disturbing is not that Mr. Obama was wrong, but that apparently he was right. By all accounts so far, the government had no concrete intelligence warning of the assault on Wednesday that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.
Swift, ruthless and deadly, the attack appeared to reflect an evolution of the terrorist threat that Mr. Obama and federal officials have long dreaded: homegrown, self-radicalized individuals operating undetected before striking one of many soft targets that can never be fully protected in a country as sprawling as the United States.
“We have moved to an entirely new phase in the global terrorist threat and in our homeland security efforts,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said in an interview on Saturday. Terrorists have “in effect outsourced attempts to attack our homeland. We’ve seen this not just here but in other places. This requires a whole new approach, in my view.”
OMG, you guys, the problem is that Obama is so right about everything, even he couldn’t believe how right he was about this! Besides, no President could every keep a country the size of America totally safe – a talking point that is 180 degrees opposite what Obama has been yelling in our faces for weeks, while trying to defend his madcap Syrian refugee program, and insult anyone with concerns about security.
And if not even our $3.5 trillion Leviathan State can fully protect us, why is that State putting so much effort into disarming law-abiding citizens, so we won’t be able to defend ourselves? The gun-control cult is entirely premised on the promise of safety the NYT so cavalierly retracts, when it’s time to pretend nobody could be doing a better job of securing America than Barack Obama.
It’s alarming to hear America’s Homeland Security Secretary reduced to peddling ridiculous twaddle like this. No, Mr. Johnson, ISIS isn’t “outsourcing” its terrorism – the San Bernardino killers swore the bayah, the full Islamist oath of fealty, to the caliph of the Islamic State. They didn’t “outsource” Paris, either. This is all a pathetic attempt to perform a little rhetorical CPR on Obama’s insane rhetoric about “containing” and “degrading” the Islamic State and “decimating” al-Qaeda.
No, contrary to that New York Times headline, it’s business as usual in this failed White House, and we should all be scared to death about it. The major points of Obama’s national security strategy remain completely unchanged:
1. Cozying up to Islamists. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is scheduled to appear on Monday at the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Adams Center mosque. For added irony, that would be December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. The Administration is still trying to work out a relationship with Muslim Brotherhood types against the super-duper-extreme Salafist Muslim terrorist organizations, like ISIS. The odious Council on American-Islamic Relations still has a lot of sway with Team Obama as well.
2. Firewalling Islam from terrorism. The message is still that “radicalization” is a mystical process akin to hypnosis, which yanks unsuspecting Muslims beyond the pale, almost against their will – there are ongoing efforts to paint the San Bernardino jihadis themselves as victims who were mind-controlled into serving ISIS, not people who followed a logical path from devout Islam to terrorism. The Administration is prepared to risk any number of American lives to maintain the fiction of absolute and total separation between all “authentic” forms of Islam and terrorism.
One problem with this approach is that it’s logically inconsistent with the message that Islam has been “hijacked” by extremists. How can someone be “radicalized” from a belief system that has absolutely, positively nothing to do with violence, into violent terrorism? The unwillingness of our political class to admit how this radicalization process really works means it invariably seems sudden and inexplicable, as if innocent people were randomly bitten by jihad zombies.
This also muddles the message we want to sent to truly moderate Muslims. The Farook family, like the families of many other jihadis across the Western world, ignored some pretty serious warning signs, such as young Sayed Farook vocally supporting the Islamic State and railing against Israel. His “sudden radicalization” looks less abrupt the more we learn about it.
Homeland Security’s motto remains “If You See Something, Say Something,” which is a grim jest after the Ahmed the Clockmaker debacle. If we’re going to take that slogan seriously, shouldn’t we be telling moderate Muslims exactly what to look for, and exactly what to say when they see it? Shouldn’t we be alarmed that so many Americans are afraid of bringing down the wrath of politically-correct enforcers by saying something “insensitive,” like the neighbors who decided not to report suspicious activity at Farook’s house?
3. Pretending the problem is generic “extremism.” The Washington Post reports that in President Obama’s weekly address, he said that if the attacks were “motivated by radicalization,” they would “underscore a threat we’ve been focused on for years – the danger of people succumbing to violent extremist ideologies.”
This is more of Obama’s ridiculous effort to deflect criticism by patting himself on the back and praising himself for anticipating the threat that just caught him totally by surprise, but it’s also part of the ongoing effort to pretend some sort of generic, viral “extremism” is the problem. This has the useful side effect of enabling Democrats to pretend everyone they consider an “extremist” is a potential terrorist – a card they have played vigorously throughout the Obama years.
How much time and money that could have been spent fighting real terrorism has this Administration frittered away on “studies” that claim the next great terrorist threat would be from returning military veterans, Tea Party members, and Christians? How about turning that weaponized IRS, and other political attack-dog bureaucracies, against threats to American citizens, instead of using them to destroy political threats to the Democrat Party?
4. Using security fears as leverage for gun control. Obviously, that isn’t changing any time soon. The Democrat Party attacked law-abiding Americans while bullets were still flying in San Bernardino, and they’re not going to let up. That’s one reason our national security is entirely dependent on driving them completely out of power, as quickly as possible. As long as Democrats are in power, they will never have any significant policy proposal against terrorism except idiotic gun control laws. They won’t do anything except try to disarm the victims. They’ll even hold other measures, and the money to fund them, hostage to their gun-control agenda.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said as much on the Sunday talk shows this weekend, explicitly drawing a connection between the San Bernardino attacks and the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. The sun will never rise on a day that Democrats don’t dismiss their law-enforcement and national security failures as a result of insufficient gun control laws. They will point to each new mound of corpses as fresh proof they should be given what they want.
5. Pretending the real menace is the perpetually looming “backlash” against Muslims. Speaking of Lynch, it’s not surprising she immediately leaped into action to proclaim her “greatest fear” is not jihadis slaughtering innocent Americans, but rather the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric.”
She proceeded to threaten Americans who use “anti-Muslim rhetoric” and “violent talk,” in the latest incarnation of the Left’s phony passion play about free expression. “Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech,” she graciously admitted, “but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric or, as we saw after 9/11, violence against individuals… when we see that, we will take action.”
The Democrat Party is deeply wedded to the notion that a hypothetical anti-Muslim backlash is a much greater menace than actual Islamist terrorism. It’s part of their “War on Generic Extremism” message, described above. It’s also a way for them to vent their extreme hatred of middle America. And, as with global warming, fighting a non-existent threat that allows for plenty of elitist moral posturing is much easier, and more fun, than dealing with real problems.
6. Insulting Americans who lack faith in Obama’s competence as ‘fraidy cats. You’ll be getting a lot of that, folks, so be sure to take whatever stomach medication helps you deal with it. Obama will double down, again and again, on his talking point that anyone who worries about Islamist terrorism is abandoning reason and giving in to fear. This is the same guy who was just at a global-warming conference in Paris, hallucinating about schools of fish swimming through the streets of Miami.
No, nothing significant is going to change until Obama is gone, liberal pundits are demanding the scalp of whichever genius thought it was a good idea to run Hillary Clinton for President, and the remains of the Democrat caucus in Congress sincerely believes they have to adjust their ideology in order to survive the next election.
Barack Obama is a man who doesn’t think he’s ever done anything wrong in his entire life, so he’s not about to start doing anything right.