Posted on August
17, 2014
No Worries For
O
The tragedy of liberal tranquility
by
Daniel
Clark
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has been
ridiculed for saying the Obama administration has “substantially improved … the
tranquility of the global community.”
Then again, why shouldn’t he think so, since the president has
repeatedly declared threats to the United States to be nonexistent?
This January, President Obama dismissed the ISIS
terror group by telling the New Yorker,
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV
team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Notice that this wasn’t just a reckless,
flippant remark by the president, but that it was “the analogy we use around
here.” No wonder he saw no need to
conduct air strikes against ISIS when it first invaded Iraq, and was basically
a giant caravan of targets roaming the desert.
Perhaps it’s understandable that he didn’t perceive
ISIS as a threat, since that organization boastfully named itself the “Islamic
State,” when it was nowhere near being identifiable as a nation. Surely, our president wouldn’t be so
dismissive of a well-established enemy like Iran, would he? Of course he would. In 2008, while defending his position of
holding 
negotiations
with Iran without preconditions, Obama said, “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these
countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a threat to us the way the
Soviet Union posed a threat to us. … If Iran ever tried to pose a serious
threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”
[Note to the phonies at Factcheck.org: You defended this statement of Obama’s by
focusing on its references to the Soviet Union, adding, “Nor did he say Iran
doesn’t pose a serious threat, except in comparison to the Soviet Union. And that’s a fact.” Not to put a fine point on it, but when he said,
“If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a
chance,” he meant that Iran doesn’t pose a serious threat. If you were in the business of fact-checking,
instead of embarrassing liberal suckuppery, you would
have understood that.]
What about a country that’s nearly as big as the
former Soviet Union, like modern-day Russia?
When Mitt Romney called Russia our “number one geopolitical foe,” Obama
ridiculed him as being “stuck in a Cold War mind warp.” If that’s where Romney was stuck, Russian President
Vladimir Putin was right there with him.
Yet when Putin seized Crimea from neighboring Ukraine, Obama’s response
was to puffily lecture that redrawing European
borders by force is not proper 21st Century behavior.
So to summarize, the president with the Alfred E. Neuman ears has been unworried about an irascible Russia
led by a nostalgic KGB officer, Iranian mullahs bent on producing nuclear
weapons so that they may bring about Armageddon, and a terrorist army that is
to al-Qaeda as Tony Montana was to Frank Lopez.
Instead, he and Secretary of State Kerry have repeatedly declared that
their top foreign policy priority is “climate change.” It would be comical, if not for the
unspeakable human costs of allowing evil to go unchallenged.
It
isn’t that liberals like Obama are afraid to confront evil, it’s just that they
think the evil is their own country.
That’s why, in 2008, Obama was looking forward to “fundamentally
transforming the United States of America,” while his greatest concern about
our foreign adversaries was his desire to win their approval. Hence his infamous attempt to “reset”
relations with Russia, his unilateral lifting of sanctions against Iran, and
his endless game of footsies with the Muslim Brotherhood, among other examples.
Meanwhile at home, he has abandoned our borders,
threatened our energy supply, cheapened our money, discouraged our industry,
mothballed our missile defenses, flouted our Constitution and depressed our
morale. If only he would attack America’s
enemies with that same kind of zeal.
Think all this destruction has been
unintentional? Then why the
tranquility? Why all the leisure
time? Why never a pang of concern, let
alone regret, for any of these things he has done to us?
Nobody sets out to fundamentally transform something
he already values as it currently exists.
If Obama doesn’t think America is worth preserving, it’s only natural
that he be unmotivated to defend it from foreign threats, reacting instead with
a detached tranquility. The results are
plain for anyone to see. ISIS leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi has promised a “direct confrontation” with America. The
president, who once coldly assessed that we could “absorb” another 9-11, hasn’t
let it interfere with his golf game.
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