By John Fund
Sunday, December 06, 2015
President Obama’s decision to suddenly address the
country from the Oval Office tonight for only the third time is in part a
belated realization that he and his party have lost touch with the country on
terrorism.
The initial response by Obama and other Democrats to
recent terror attacks was listless and inexplicable. Obama termed the Paris
massacre a mere “setback” and continued to claim that climate change was a
greater threat, and he also has steadfastly refused to identify “radical
Islamic terrorism” as the enemy in the war on terror. Instead, his first
instinct was to call for more gun control: “The one thing we do know is that we
have a pattern of mass shootings that have no parallel anywhere in the world.”
That is an obvious lie in the wake of recent terror incidents around the world
from Paris to Mali.
For her part, Hillary Clinton also called for more gun
control, before she finally acknowledged that perhaps the U.S. visa-screening
program needed “a hard look.”
In the wake of San Bernardino, Attorney General Loretta
Lynch promptly announced that “her greatest fear” was that anti-Islam “rhetoric
will be accompanied by acts of violence.” She pledged to prosecute anyone who
engaged in “anti-Muslim rhetoric” that “edges towards violence” against
Muslims. It is an odd priority given that Jews are consistently targeted for
their faith far more often than members of any other religious group, and that
the latest statistics show that over 60 percent of religious hate crimes in
this country are committed against Jews, with less than 14 percent against
Muslims.
As for prosecuting the war on terror, more and more
experts have begun questioning the White House’s failed strategy. Former CIA
director Michael Morrell admitted that concerns about environmental damage have
prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the ISIS.
“We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells
that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we
didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure,” Morell said last week on PBS’s Charlie Rose.
In the last few days, Democrats in Congress have begun
hearing from constituents who are angry at Democrats’ out-to-lunch reaction to
the recent terrorist attacks. Even liberal commentators have started raising
the alarm. Mark Shields, a former Democratic campaign strategist turned PBS
commentator, warned that since Paris, “the Democrats have been tone-deaf” on
the rising tide of terrorism. “There is a sense of fear,” he said. “Since
Paris, you have Great Britain going in against ISIS. You have got Germany going
in against ISIS. This was really a seminal event, Paris was, and I think San
Bernardino is, just another chapter in that.”
But Democrats have for now been paralyzed by their
political correctness, which has stifled a vigorous Democratic response to
recent terror attacks. Hillary Clinton said today on ABC’s This Week that she still won’t use the term “radical Islam” because
“it doesn’t do justice to the vast number of Muslims in our country and around
the world who are peaceful people.”
New Jersey governor Chris Christie scoffed at that
reasoning. “They won’t say radical Islamic jihadist,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation today in criticizing
Obama and Clinton. They fail to see, he said, why it’s vital to describe the
enemy properly so that we can properly combat them: “Now when you say ‘radical
Islamic jihadist,’ they understand, the rest of the Muslim community
understands. The folks who are peaceful and who attend mosques in a peaceful
way, work in our country, raise their families, pay their taxes. They know
they’re not radical Islamic jihadists.”
President Obama’s speech tonight will be an attempt to
lower the level of fear the country is feeling, and he will also aim to
convince people that he has the issue in hand. But more and more Democrats are
anxious that a tone-deaf White House is pushing the party back to the days of
the late 1970s and 1980s, when Democratic candidates from Jimmy Carter to
Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis were viewed as insufficiently responsive to
foreign-policy threats. The party paid a price for that, and Democrats worry
that they now look out-of-touch and uncertain in foreign policy. To the extent
that continues, the Democratic party could pay a steep price at the polls next
year.
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