There are so many reasons, too many, why the American people now think
Barack Obama is about as good at being President as he is at hitting a golf
ball. His reaction to the execution of journalist James Foley in front of the
world is just the latest. When the going gets tough, the tough really do go
golfing.
He reacts about as well to the hideous death of Foley as his
administration has to the growing threat of ISIS. Even some of the slow
thinkers around this President ought to be able to figure that out by now.
So now Foley is dead and ISIS is threatening to kill more of ours and
this isn’t George W. Bush’s problem, or his fault. It is the problem — and more
than somewhat the fault — of this administration. President Obama has to wear
this one, and in this case that does not mean the golf clothes he wears on
Martha’s Vineyard.
Once again, in a moment of horror for this country he seems almost
weirdly detached. It was no different when radicals in Ukraine shot a passenger
jet out of the sky and killed hundreds of innocent people, and Obama originally
spent less than a minute on that in a speech in Delaware before returning to
his prepared text, and then more fund-raising after that.
The country believes less and less in his ability to do what he was
hired to do — actually lead — and to connect with both the fear and the anger
about an event like this. Once more he seems to be counting the days until he
is an ex-President, when his whole life becomes rhetoric and speeches instead
of actual leadership.
Of course nothing he was going to do on Wednesday was going to bring
back Foley, or stop ISIS dead in its tracks. But he should have waited at least
one day before hitting the links with his buddies. The rollout of Obamacare was
smarter than this.
“It is clear that (ISIS) didn’t have our complete attention, even
though this is a terrorist group that publishes an annual report you can
actually find online,” Raymond Kelly, the great former police commissioner of
this city who rewrote the book on counterterrorism in a 9/11 world, was saying
on Thursday morning from Los Angeles. “But they finally have our attention
now.”
Then Kelly added this: “We now have to show that we won’t be
intimidated by these people. If we have to respond with even more air strikes
in areas where we think they might be located, that’s what we have to do. I
don’t see how we have any choice.”
The murder of James Foley was not the murder of thousands at the World
Trade Center, Bin Laden’s men bringing death out of the sky that day. It was
the death of a journalist, but felt the same as the cold-blooded execution of
an American serviceman or woman, as we all watched helplessly, after our
government had refused to pay as much as $132 million in ransom.
So now the man John “the Beatle” becomes the most wanted man on the
planet, the way Bin Laden once was before SEAL Team Six put enough bullets into
him. They will use tips and social media and voice recognition to identify him
and track him down, and maybe this time it will take weeks or months instead of
the years it took the best of our special forces to finally track down Bin
Laden.
Only now he is gone and ISIS is so obviously populated with his Bin Laden’s
bedbug disciples. And the rise of ISIS has absolutely happened on this
President’s watch. He absolutely does not get to put this on Bush, as much of a
failure as he was, or anybody else. The cycle continues. One terrorist
organization breeds another. We go into Iraq more than a decade ago and we are
going to clean up everything over there, and what happens instead is that the
country eventually becomes a Parris Island for ISIS.
“These guys are just using Zarqawi’s old playbook,” Ray Kelly said,
referencing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the militant Islamist who formed al-Tawhid in
the 1990s, and one of whose specialties in Iraq became hostage executions. He
eventually threw in with Bin Laden. Two Air Force jets finally bombed him all
the way to the gates of hell in June 2006.
So he is gone, but others have replaced him. Now there is ISIS and John
the Beatle and the hostage executed is James Foley, because we wouldn’t pay up
and didn’t rescue him in time. We hear all the time about U.S. intelligence.
More and more in this administration, it seems like an oxymoron.
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