OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The King of Glib sure isn’t ready for the serious business of actually getting things done.
President Obama shined at Saturday night’s correspondents’ dinner in front of the gold curtain, floating on a sea of sequined gowns and penguin suits, tossing out witty and daring one-liners.
But standing there at Tuesday’s news conference talking about terrorism, chemical weapons and all the problems of governing, Mr. Obama looked and sounded like a bad performance of a sad parody of former President George W. Bush that you might see on “Saturday Night Live.”
“This stuff is hard,” he whined, trying to explain how he and his administration failed to thwart the bloodiest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
“The FBI performed its duties,” he explained. “Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”
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Seriously? Wow.
The president was talking about how the FBI had been alerted by the Russians to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother who masterminded the Boston Marathon bombings. The FBI actually took the Chechen, here on a visa, into custody in 2011 and interviewed him. The FBI concluded the budding terrorist was not a threat. And let him go. And, apparently, lost track of him.
How is this not viewed as an outright scandal — or at least a story worth doggedly pursuing — by the very same media that spent the past decade poring over every hint that was missed in the run-up to 9/11? Remember the memo to Condoleezza Rice warning that al Qaeda wanted to attack America? Perhaps a bit vague, but enough to keep the press busy for years.
What does Mr. Obama have to say?
“We’re having success defeating al Qaeda,” he told reporters.
Seriously? You call that “success?” Well, if that is “success,” I sure hate to see one of your “failures.”
Now his big concerns are the “self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States.”
Well, golly, gee, Mr. President. Would that have anything to do with your continued failure to address our disastrous immigration system? Maybe we might be a little more picky about the malcontents to whom we give visas. And maybe we might crack down on all the ones here illegally in the first place.
Mr. Obama showed himself furtherest out of his depth talking about mounting proof that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime used chemical weapons to indiscriminately kill swaths of his own people.
He acknowledged that the weapons have been used, “but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them.” Really? Who does he think used them? The Red Cross?
“We don’t have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened,” he said, sounding like a two-bit lawyer trying to stall the incontrovertible court case against his clearly guilty client.
Mr. Obama’s real worry? “The strong possibility that those chemical weapons can fall into the wrong hands.”
Doesn’t that sound like that horse might already be out of the barn?
Seriously, this is no longer your pot-smoking “Choom Gang” back in the idle sun of Hawaii. This is serious business.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com or via Twitter at @charleshurt.
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