Once again, the buck never reached Barack Obama’s desk. The president didn’t get ISIS wrong. He says he was misled by the boobs in the U.S. intelligence committee. You know, the exact same people he and Joe Biden swore would know the instant Iran developed a nuclear weapon. So, quit bugging him about Iranian nukes already.
But now Mr. Obama said his intelligence services suckered him into waving ISIS off as the jayvee team of al Qaeda. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Sometimes Mr. Obama is the mighty super president, bragging that he’s the smartest guy in every room he enters. At the beginning of his first presidential campaign, he boasted, “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.” He was speaking to his political director at the time.
He’s the czar of all czars, a better investor than everyone on Wall Street combined, a better doctor than every doctor in America — remember when he accused doctors of performing unnecessary tonsillectomies for cash? If you think you might need your tonsils out, get a second opinion from Mr. Obama — he can tell you if that procedure is really necessary. Not only did he take control of the health insurance industry, but he rewrites ObamaCare on the fly.
He knew the law better than any policeman or lawyer, criticizing the cops for “acting stupidly” for arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Mr. Obama’s speeches are peppered with so many uses of “I” and “me” that even his supporters make fun of him for it.
But when things go wrong, whoa, look out. Suddenly Mr. Obama is helpless, a naive young man who just kind of wandered into the White House and can’t believe what he found. He learns about everything by watching the news. His supporters start writing op-eds that say maybe America is ungovernable, nobody could really be a good president any more, there’s no way for any one man to keep track of everything the government is doing.
Mr. Obama is constantly being let down by everyone, from the American people — why don’t you hayseeds appreciate what an incredible job he’s done on the economy? — to the business community — why aren’t you guys creating more jobs? — to the intelligence services. Now he’s trying to dump the blame on them for getting ISIS wrong.
The intelligence community is pushing back. A member of the president’s national security staff told the UK Daily Mail, “Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president’s daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election. We were seeing specific threat assessments and many of them have panned out exactly as we were told they would.”
The same source noted that Pentagon officials were going on the record to warn Congress about the danger of ISIS seizing territory in Iraq, so if Mr. Obama wasn’t hearing the warnings, he was working pretty damn hard not to hear them.
A Pentagon aide was even more blunt, telling the Daily Beast that “either the President doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting, or he’s B.S. ing.” Except he didn’t say BS, he used the whole word. And he went on to say, “It’s pretty well-known that the President hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009.”
It’s not good that our intelligence services have to defend themselves from scapegoating attacks by the president of the United States while we’re in the middle of a shooting war with ISIS. Word is leaking out about low morale and nervous analysts worried that they might be the next ones who go under the bus to save a point or two of Mr. Obama’s approval ratings.
It’s easy to see why Mr. Obama is playing dumb. He spent the whole 2012 campaign boasting that he killed Osama bin Laden, decimated al Qaeda, won the war in Iraq, and punched terrorism right in the face. He ignored and suppressed all information to the contrary, because he figured it was something he could sort out later, once he got re-elected. He was ready to say anything to get re-elected. He really didn’t expect al Qaeda to cause much trouble in his second term, and he thought he could spin it all away if they did. He also never thought Bashar Assad of Syria would cross his “red line” on chemical weapons. Foreign policy is all talk to Obama — he gives speeches and the world applauds. He didn’t even want to cut into his golfing and vacation time, and fundraising to do anything about ISIS until they almost pulled off a genocide, and came close to taking Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Irbil.
Guess what? ISIS didn’t pay much attention to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. They’re not interested in his speeches. His opinion on whether they’re truly “Islamic” means nothing to them. They don’t care if he thinks they’re on the wrong side of history, or have no place in the 21st Century. They just knocked over another Iraqi military base and seized more weapons. We’re dropping bombs to take out our own military equipment, which ISIS took from the Iraqi army after it routed them. They’ve killed and tortured incredible numbers of people.
Mr. Obama got them wrong, and he ignored everyone who got them right, from the CIA to Mitt Romney. This is all on him.
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