OPINION:
Imagine there’s a horrible mass murder of 130 people and then another one a short time later in another town, with 14 people killed. This innocent collection of moms, dads, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, and best friends murdered as they were eating at a café, enjoying a concert with friends and loved-ones or celebrating the holiday season.
Then imagine someone explaining that he didn’t grasp the “anxiety” such an event would cause because he didn’t watch enough cable television. How is it, one might naturally ask, that someone wouldn’t have the natural empathy or sympathy to understand the horrific nature of such of an event, and its impact, without watching television?
But that is exactly the position of the leader of the free world, Barack Obama, the President of the United States.
I am, of course, referring to the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist massacres and President Obama’s shocking remarks to columnists, first reported by The New York Times: “In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. …”
It is troubling enough to live in a world where Western leaders have allowed such barbaric terrorism to invade the cities of the civilized, but quite another revelation when it’s the president of the United States openly confessing that his connection to humanity is so tenuous he’s unable to comprehend the most basic of reactions — like horror over mass murder.
Some pundits and columnists have argued Obama was simply re-stating his oft-expressed critique that cable television (read Fox News) presents terrorism as something more serious than it is; that he believes what’s happening isn’t as bad as people think, and certain cable channels are just ginning people up.
That, however, confirms my point: Obama truly cannot relate to the normal human reaction of disgust and horror over a terrorist attack. He genuinely doesn’t think it’s a big deal when any number of people are murdered by Islamist terrorists.
To believe that “cable television” is controlling the reaction of how normal human beings feel about a planned, indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people is in itself pathological in its lack of empathy and sympathy. It also highlights what Charles Krauthammer noted on Fox News: that Obama believes he’s simply smarter than everyone else, ergo it’s dumb and strange for others to have so much “anxiety” over terrorist mass murder.
Mr. Obama’s lack of reaction to the Islamic State terror group’s savagery, indicating he should be in a psychiatrist’s office instead of the Oval Office, wasn’t last week’s only revelation. We were also informed that the Department of Homeland Security has in place a secret rule prohibiting immigration officials from scanning the social media accounts of foreigners trying to enter the United States.
Why, you may ask, would we ban a review of public writings of people trying to get visas or immigrate to this country? Because, as reported by The Hill and ABC News, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson decided to keep the prohibition in place in early 2014 because he feared a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations.”
Keep in mind, this ban on the use of public social media in the screening process due to supposed concerns about privacy for foreigners comes from the same Obama administration that has defended over and over again the NSA’s wholesale collection of genuinely private communications of American citizens.
Also last week, The Hill ran a blockbuster commentary piece by Philip Haney, a DHS whistleblower, describing how the Obama administration shut down an investigative project that was connecting the dots between Islamist terrorists on U.S. soil and the networks which created and supported them.
“There are terrorists in our midst and they arrived here using legal means right under the noses of the federal law enforcement agencies whose mission is to stop them,” Mr. Haney wrote. “That is not due to malfeasance or lack of effort on the part of these officers; it is due to the restrictions placed on them by the Obama administration.”
Mr. Haney argued the information his team was assembling very well could have raised the red flags necessary to prevent the San Bernardino massacre.
It wasn’t enough for Mr. Obama’s regime to kill the project, they also literally deleted Mr. Haney’s team files and research. He concludes, the “Obama administration is more concerned with the rights of non-citizens in known Islamist groups than with the safety and security of the American people.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Haney is right. Consider all the latest revelations and their singular result of making it easier for Islamic terrorists to enter the country: Mr. Obama’s obsession with flooding the country with Syrian “refugees”; the administration’s refusal to attack the Islamic State with any seriousness; the ban on scanning social media of foreigners trying to enter the US; and the killing and deleting a successful government project tracking terrorists on U.S. soil.
The fact on the ground is this: Mr. Obama and his administration are taking direct actions deliberately making it easier for terrorists to enter the country. That is not a mistake, or an oversight, or incompetence. It’s a choice, and it must not continue to stand.
Tammy Bruce is a radio talk show host.
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