I’ve watched in horrified wonder these last few weeks as a man way over his head tries to act like he knows what he’s doing. But he’s not fooling anyone. Not even his most rabid supporters. The great, shrinking American President – Barack Obama.
Here are a couple of quotes he’s made which typify his vacuousness – something at which he is quite adept:
We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem.
A manageable problem. Yeah, that’s kind of open to any definition you want to hang on it, isn’t it? It’s business school talk. What defines a “manageable problem” when talking about religious fanatics killing American citizens (as well as middle easterners by the thousands) to taunt the US president? Are we there if they only behead one American journalist next year? If they only crucify half the number they did this year, are we “managing” the “problem”? Oh, and by the way, what ever happened to R2P? Only applicable to Libya? And boy, did we “manage” that “problem” well. Our embassy is now a jihadi swim club.
[W]hat we’ve got to do is make sure that we are organizing the Arab world, the Middle East, the Muslim world, along with the international community to isolate this cancer.
Organize the Middle East? I’d laugh out loud if what was going on wasn’t so dangerous. This guy couldn’t organize a one man parade. He couldn’t lead a horse to water after a 10 mile run in the desert. And coherence, as in a coherent policy? Forget about that. Ed Morrissey nails it:
The failure demonstrated by Obama and his administration over the last several weeks and months as the ISIS threat grew and metastasized is, at its core, a leadership crisis. Forget being the leader of the free world; this President can’t even lead his own team within one coherent message and strategy. As ABC’s State Department reporter Ali Weinberg remarked yesterday, this was the message just from one single day: “We’re going to destroy ISIS. Or manage them. Or shrink their sphere of influence. Or follow them to the gates of hell.”
With that failure to generate a united and coherent approach to ISIS among his own team, how could anyone expect the President to lead the world against this new terrorist army and the threat it poses to the region and the world?
They can’t, and he won’t. Oh the “world” may do something, but it won’t be because of any leadership from Obama, et. al. It will be because they’re awake to the threat that is ISIS and finally develop the intestinal fortitude to act. And the US? Like Libya, we’ll “lead from behind”.
What in the world could possibly go wrong with that?
~McQ