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Some Thought On Last Night’s Presidential Address
I don’t normally watch presidential addresses. I try to tune out any time a politician is flapping their gums, especially on television. However, if I’m going to write about this kind of thing, I guess I have a responsibility to watch them.
I have a few thoughts, in no particular order:
- I couldn’t help but think of Rush Limbaugh’s compliment of Obama that he says nothing better than anybody else. Obama has lost his sparkle, so he didn’t do it that well. But he said a whole lot of nothing.
- He announced he’d be bombing Syria and arming Syrian opposition forces. You know, the stuff he wanted to do a year ago, but got shouted down on by the public.
- He claims the authority, but it’d be nice if Congress agreed with him.
- He got kind of far afield. It’s not 2012. He’s doesn’t need to brag about how well he thinks the auto industry is doing.
- And somehow this is about Ebola too?
- And the plan is to do this by arming Syrian opposition (aka: God knows who) and using airstrikes? To me, that sounds like a recipe for dragging this out for a decade. But who knows, maybe Obama has the magic touch.
- There’s a few episodes of 30 Rock where Queen Latifah play a Congresswoman named Bookman. Bookman goes off on these riffs where she just starts talking about the flag and the troops “and the flag troops” and says a whole lot of nothing in a preacher voice. Mrs. Cole, after hearing President Obama’s speech tonight, mocked it by making reference to that. It was a fair shot. He’s bombing Syria and arming Syrian rebels. That’s it. But he went on for 15 minutes about it and said nothing else.
- Barack Obama continues to look like hell.
That’s it. Those are my raw thoughts in no particular order. He gave no details. It was all fluff.
Thank you, President Obama, for reminding me why I don’t watch these things.
Published in General
Very interesting article by Fred Cole in yesterday’s Federalist.
http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/10/eight-hard-headed-questions-about-the-third-iraq-war/
My thoughts on the answers: 1. Yes; 2 through 8, no.
“Yes” to questions 1 (Is a vital national security interest threatened?) and 7 (Is the action supported by the American people?) trumps “No” to the other 6 to get started. But the others have to be quickly addressed to continue successfully.
My concern is Obama did this just to halt his slide in the polls and divert the media’s attention to something else. He really doesn’t care about this and just wants it to go away.
Easy fellas. We don’t want any trouble, not in any language.
We only like it when our guy does it. If the other guy does it, we don’t like it.
So we’re going to arm Syrian rebels and they are going to fight the Islamic State for us? That’s brilliant. Wasn’t ISIS born out of the Syrian rebel movement?
I guess we should also arm Hamas so they can fight anti-Israeli terrorists. Let us also send arms and money to Hezbollah so they can fight terrorism in Lebanon and send some money and arms to the Taliban so they can bring civil liberties to Afghanistan.
I agree with the rest of your points but not this one. Obama did not want to bomb in Syria or arm the moderate rebels. That was the Hillary criticism a few weeks ago, that Obama refused to act in Syria. Obama responded by saying that people who thought arming the Syrian Rebels would work were delusional. People inside and outside the administration wanted action in Syria but Obama did not want to do anything.
Actually, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres brought back Yassir Arafat and his Fatah (PLO) terrorists from Tunis to run the Palestinian Authority, with the explicit expectation that only the PLO would be ruthless enough to hunt down Hamas. The Israeli right was vindicated in their objection to this plan, but only after Israel learned a painful lesson. Too bad that Obama can’t learn from seeing others’ mistakes.
It’s pitiful to see Obama call his ISIS plan a “strategy”. An actual strategy would cover all our enemies in the region, including the Iranian and Assad regimes. His plan seems not to consider the wider Sunni-Shia civil war, what risks it carries for the US, or how to use it to our advantage.
The whole Arab Spring thing seemed to be about replacing dictators with terrorists. The idea that “we have to help them” never felt right to me because the people we would be helping are . . . ?
Mark Steyn and I could have chorused a duet of ‘For Once in My Life’ as we watched Bill Maher, in a Bloomberg interview, challenge Charlie Rose’s weak and clumsy defense of Islam as not being the root of today’s terrorism across the world. Never thought I could be in such solid accord with Mr. Maher. And Mr. Rose is pitiful but a fine exemplar of liberal foolishness.
We probably (at least subconsciously) hoped that these revolutions would be like the American Revolution with modern Arabic versions of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin leading the movement. In some countries, the rebellions may have been started by people wanting government recognition of human rights and civil liberties as we in the West understand them. But however they started, these revolutions always seem to end up being run by people who are enemies – rather than advocates – of freedom.
“Going forward we no longer refer to them as the Islamic State but instead all official White House communications will refer to them as this unpronounceable symbol . When talking about them we will say The Terrorist Group Formerly Known as Islamic State.”
Fred, thank you for watching and reminding me why I shut off any TV or radio as soon as possible when I hear the President. I wish he spoke like an adult in the Peanuts cartoons — Wah, wah, wah, wah wah. It’s about as effective.
This is brilliant, Vance.
Can you please explain why you think the authorization to use force in Iraq and the authorization to use force against al-Qaeda don’t give him that authority?
The kid can’t stop campaigning. What a maroon.
Fred,
I’m a little surprised you didn’t address the President’s statement that “ISIL is not Islamic.” That usually seems to be a bugaboo for you when someone claims that someone else isn’t what he calls himself.
For example, when I have contended that Barack Obama is not Christian because of his support for infanticide (in the form of partial birth abortion), you’ve come down on me like a load of bricks. Well, now let me quote the President himself, “No religion supports the killing of innocent people.” If ISIL isn’t Islamic, Barack Obama isn’t Christian. QED.
Well, look, I’m a selfish, greedy Randite. However, when it comes to Ricochet, I try to always be more charitable to my fellow members. To put it another way: I didn’t want to comment on everything. I needed to leave some stuff for other people to kick around.
Either way, Fred would like it reiterated.
Saying ISIS is Islamic is like saying the KKK is Christian. I mean, yeah it’s true. But other than an implied slander against billions of people through guilt by association, I don’t see how it accomplishes anything.
The real answer is that I didn’t see it as a productive area of discussion for me. If other people want to kick it around, that’s fine. I just didn’t feel the need to comment on it.
(And before someone complains, no I’m not equating Christianity to the KKK, Christianity to Islam, or anything else.)
I will not that the difference between your infanticide thing and this is that when you do it, you’re talking about an individual, whereas he was making a collective statement about an organization.
That’s not going to happen, I think. Republicans should keep their distance from this little enterprise: if BO wants to go it alone, let him have at it.
So please make them change their name.
As a matter of historical record, Islam spread around the globe through groups using the same approach that ISIS is using now. They had a bit of a lull, true, but they’re back.
And the KKK may be comprised of Christians, but there is nothing in Christian doctrine that I’m aware of that justifies their actions.
There is much in Islamic doctrine that justifies ISIS’s actions.
Very poor choice of analogy.
Right. That’s why I didn’t want to go there.
Tuck- it is generally true that Islam spread as a result of conquest by the early caliphs. It is not true that the conquests of early Islam were characterized by the same degree of intolerance and shocking brutality that is the hallmark of modern jihadists such as The Islamic State. The early caliphate did not require conversion of non-Muslims to Islam nor did it expel non-Muslims from newly conquered Islamic territory. Non-Muslims were certainly treated as second-class citizens, but that meant that they were subject to a poll tax known as the jizya and were barred from certain governmental offices, particularly in the military.
I do these things because I love each and every one of you.
I in no way mean to suggest you’re anything less than a wonderful human being. It’s your position I’m taking issue with.
I think religious groups have identifiable boundaries of belief and behavior. In this way, I’m inclined to agree with the President (blood running from the corner of my eye…). I wish actual Muslims would say about ISIL(IS) what the President said last night, if the individuals within ISIL are behaving in a way incompatible with Islam.
And I’m telling you, as one who takes seriously the admonition (not to kill the innocent) of a God who will judge us all one day, Obama’s position on partial birth abortion is incompatible with Christianity. He cannot believe in both infanticide and a just God who will decide his eternal destiny.
That’s fine. Clearly he (and other people) disagree.
So after hearing our Christian/non-Christian President last night, does anyone believe his administration has any coherent approach to dealing with the Islamic/non-Islamic threat posed by ISIL?
There must be a pony in here somewhere.
“The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived.”
“…formation of a state in the Arabian peninsula and ideological (i.e. religious) coherence and mobilization was a primary reason why the Muslim armies in the space of a hundred years were able to establish the largest pre-modern empire until that time. The estimates for the size of the Islamic Caliphate suggest it was more than thirteen million square kilometers (five million square miles), making it larger than all current states except the Russian Federation.”
So you’re suggesting they accomplished all this with wit and charm?
Nothing ISIS is doing is out of line with the practice of war at that time. Heck, the Romans crucified a person or two, and ISIS hasn’t come close to what happened to Carthage:
“Many Carthaginians died from starvation during the later part of the siege, while many others died in the final six days of fighting. When the war ended, the remaining 50,000 Carthaginians, a small part of the original pre-war population, were, as was the normal fate in antiquity of inhabitants of sacked cities, sold into slavery by the victors. Carthage was systematically burned for 17 days; the city’s walls and buildings were utterly destroyed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Punic_War
I’m not willing to participate in the attempt to white-wash Islam. It’s a violent religion that encourages violence, and it’s always been such.
OK, well apparently the comment editor no longer works… (Someone should start a thread about that. :)
Here’s the link to the history of the Muslim conquests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests
No.