OPINION:
President Obama may have admitted he doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL or whatever it’s being called today), but he does have a blueprint for handling his critics here in the United States, because to this president, they are the real enemy.
Murdered American hostages are just another political problem to Mr. Obama’s team, because that’s the only kind of problem they care about, and the only kind they know how to handle. This administration is laser-focused on one thing: politics.
The latest Gallup poll shows the president down to 38 percent approval by the American people. It’s proof that the “style over substance administration” is no longer fooling all of the people, all of the time, and Mr. Cool now looks like Mr. Fool.
The president has been taking a lot of heat for referring to the Islamic State as the “junior varsity” team of al Qaeda less than a year ago. But he’s not going to humbly admit he made a hideous mistake. No, he sent his spokesman, Josh Earnest, out to deny he ever said it. That’s right: a comment that has become famous around the world, and this White House thinks they can just hoodwink everyone into forgetting about it, now that it’s become a massive embarrassment.
Even The Washington Post felt compelled to give the White House a “four Pinocchio” fact-check fail for spinning Mr. Obama’s “JV” mistake. Mr. Obama did indeed say, “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.”
He absolutely was talking specifically about the Islamic State. He was answering a question about the organization taking over the city of Fallujah in Iraq. He was saying that ISIS taking over what he called a “profoundly conservative Sunni city” was no big deal, something any band of local jokers could do. He said they were not a threat to other countries, the way Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda was.
In fact, Mr. Obama’s very next sentence, after the infamous “junior varsity” crack, was: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland, versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
Trying to spin this comment as anything but a catastrophic error on Mr. Obama’s part is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. The president and his people were absolutely 100 percent wrong about this threat. They’re not limiting themselves to local power struggles, and they sure as heck aren’t “sectarian.”
Then State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf ran out to sternly denounce the administration’s true enemy: Fox News. Never mind the savages who murdered a couple of American captives. The real threat is Bill O’Reilly.
On Twitter, Ms. Harf claimed fellow State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki “explains foreign policy with intelligence and class. Too bad the same can’t be said for Bill O’Reilly.”
Let’s ask Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens how much intelligence and class the Obama State Department brings to foreign policy, shall we? By the way, if Ms. Psaki’s name sounds familiar, she’s the administration official who became famous for trying to shame Vladimir Putin out of the Ukraine with Twitter hashtags. That showed a lot of “intelligence and class,” didn’t it?
Mr. Obama himself tried to spin his problems away last week by saying, “The world’s always been messy, we’re just noticing now, in part, because of social media.” As if the Islamic State is only a problem because they’ve got Twitter accounts — 29,000 of them, in fact, created in just the past few weeks.
None of this is new, nor should it be a surprise. People paying attention easily predicted an extremist uprising in Iraq after we withdrew. I predicted it often on my radio show; Dinesh D’Souza went into great detail in his movie “2016.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said, “This is a danger I’ve been pointing to. It’s not a spin, it’s not a whim, it is a clinical diagnosis of a pathological movement that is sweeping our area, but will soon come to a theater near you.”
The White House is bullying the truth, bullying reporters and to be quite honest, bullying the American people, and now the mainstream media can no longer bury stories about his failures.
The few media outlets Democrats don’t control, such as The Washington Times, talk radio and many great blogs and Internet outlets, thankfully report the truth on what this administration is up to.
However, the hubris persists, along with a firm belief that with enough bluster and trickery, lies will become the truth.
For this shameful abuse of power in the bully pulpit, Josh Earnest and the White House spin team are this week’s Liberal Bullies of the Week.
Rusty Humphries, a nationally syndicated talk-radio host, is a contributor to The Washington Times.
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