In His Last State of the Union, Obama Disastrously Boasted of an End of War

Literally, everything about him -- everything he says, thinks, does, believes, or is -- is wrong.

President Obama's 2014 State of the Union address is remembered today mainly for this bit of rhetorical irony: "America must move off a permanent war footing."

It was the triumph of speechwriting over experience. Obama’s pledge came about three weeks after the fall of Fallujah to the Islamic State. By June, Mosul would be overrun. Global jihadism now has a cause -- Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s sham caliphate -- around which to rally. It controls unprecedented territory and resources. It has a stream of thousands of Western recruits cycling in and out of the Middle East. And it encompasses a dangerous competition between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, in which acts of terrorism are a source of street credibility.

Obama’s reaction, as always, has been restrained. The world does much to disappoint him, but it apparently has nothing to teach him. Every signal he has recently sent -- in his lack of an appropriate symbolic reaction to the Paris attacks, in his limp, equivocal performance beside a more determined British Prime Minister David Cameron -- seems to be saying: I am not going to repeat George W. Bush’s overreaction to terrorism, which only feeds extremism.

...

We have come a long way when an American president pompously urges the French to curb their cowboy instincts.

That's by Michael Gerson, and well worth reading.

I linked this Jonah Goldberg piece on Friday, but this recap of Captain Bullshit's fundamental core values of dissembling and flat-out lying no matter how obvious those lies are is worth reading.

The Obama administration seems to believe that the wonder-working power of their words can get everyone to stop believing their lying eyes and ears. It's tempting to ask, "How stupid do they think we are?" But the more relevant question is, "How stupid do they think the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are?" Whatever appeal the Islamic State may or may not have in the larger Muslim world, Barack Obama insisting "it is not Islamic" surely makes no difference whatsoever. And as for the jihadists, it’s not like his words speak louder than his drone strikes.

It's true that the Obama administration has had remarkable success playing word games. They "created or saved" millions of jobs -- as if that was a real economic metric. (For what it’s worth, I do or save 500 pushups every morning). They decimated "core al-Qaeda," with the tautological definition of "core al-Qaeda" being "the parts of al-Qaeda that we have decimated."

But this is different. Those distortions were political buzzphrases intended for domestic consumption and a re-election campaign. This is a much bigger deal. The threat of Islamic extremism transcends Obama's theological hubris and lexicological shenanigans. All that Obama’s insipid rhetorical gamesmanship does is send the signal to friend and foe alike that he can’t or won’t see the problem for what it is.

posted by Ace at 01:50 PM

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