Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican elected just last year, traveled to the site of the shootings in San Berardino, California, and offered these thoughts late last night:
We are not at war with terrorism, which is just a tactic. We are not at war with some empty sociological label called extremism. We are not even just at war with ISIS; though were obviously at war with ISIS, but there will be other enemies that will lift the black flag of death in the future even after ISIS has been routed in Syria and Iraq. This is not about workplace violence. This is not about global warming or gun shows. This is not about income inequality. This is not about kids from broken homes as tragic as that is. This is not about anything that we have done wrong. This is about who we are. This is about the nature of freedom so who are we were people who unite around the Constitution were people who come together around a First Amendment and we together, 320 million of us, believe in the freedom of religion, in the freedom of speech, and the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press . . .
. . . We are most certainly though at war with militant Islam; we are at war with violent Islam; we are at war with jihadi Islam. We are not at war with all Muslims; we are not at war with Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan who want the American dream for their kids. But we are at war with those who believe that they will kill in the name of religion. President Obama said tonight he’s worried about a backlash against American Muslims. I am too, and you know what the best way to combat that is? With the truth. By being clear about who we are and what we stand for and by being clear about those who would try to kill us because we believe in freedom.
Intelligence Sources: Psst, Mr. President, Maybe This Did Come from Overseas
President Obama, last night: “So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”
Yeah, you probably should have waited before emphasizing that point, Mr. President:
The investigation into Wednesday’s terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif. has guided federal investigators in the direction of terror suspects in the Middle East who may have made contact with gunmen Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, Fox News has learned.
A high-level intelligence source told Fox News late Sunday that investigators are pursuing several lines of inquiry that ties Farook and Malik to the Middle East, including the possibility that the two’s deadly rampage had been financed from overseas.
“We felt from early on these two couldn’t have done this alone,” the source said of the shooting in which the husband and wife killed 14 people at a county office building and injured 21 others. The source also said that the amount of evidence pointing in the direction of the Middle East had forced the Obama administration to “do an about-face” about the nature of Wednesday’s attack over the previous 24 hours.
Yeah, they sure had a lot of ammunition, firepower, and pipe-bomb material lying around for a household getting by on a county employee’s salary, didn’t they? According to public records, Farook topped out at about $55,000 a year, separate from benefits and before taxes.
Here’s the jihadist couple reentering the United States. If 24 had portrayed a pair looking like that entering the country to launch a terror attack, CAIR would have denounced their appearance as stereotyping.
Obama’s Sunday-Night Political Football
Perhaps the most ominous thing I can say about President Obama’s Sunday-night national address is that he genuinely thinks he’s reassuring a nervous country that just watched ISIS-inspired radicals slip past the much-touted DHS counterterrorism screening with not so much as a peep and kill 14 Americans and injure 21 more.
“I’ve got this, trust me.”
Obama’s speech was about three-quarters of what the cynics and his critics expected. The lone bits of good news were the president’s belated acknowledgement that the Fort Hood shooting was terrorism — not “workplace violence” — and that he didn’t announce any new executive orders dealing with gun control.
One other bit of good news: It appears the FBI and the Obama administration are no longer reluctant to characterize Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s attack, killing four Marines and a sailor at Chattanooga’s U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center in July, as terrorism:
Over the last few years, however, the terrorist threat has evolved into a new phase. As we’ve become better at preventing complex multifaceted attacks like 9/11, terrorists turn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society. It is this type of attack that we saw at Fort Hood in 2009, in Chattanooga earlier this year, and now in San Bernardino.
In November, FBI Director James Comey said the public might never know the killer’s motive.
The optics of this speech were strange — why stand in front of the desk in the Oval Office? Did he get poked or get makeup in his left eye right before he went on air? He seemed to be squinting. The only other time the president addressed the country on Sunday night, he announced the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. One expected something new, groundbreaking, or different. Instead, he offered the same proposals and same arguments.
At this point in his presidency, Obama speaks with only one tone, the slightly exasperated and sometimes not-merely-slightly exasperated “adult in the room” who constantly has to correct his fellow Americans, who are always flying off the handle, calling for options that “aren’t who we are”, betraying our values, and so on. He’s always so disappointed in us.
At certain points, Obama sounded like he was speaking to children. “The threat is real, but we will overcome it.” “We will not defeat it with tough talk, abandoning our values, or giving in to fear.” “We will prevail by being strong and smart.”
He made yet another pitch for barring anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list from purchasing firearms. He simply ignored any of the objections, whether it’s the lack of due process or judicial review, the arbitrary, foggy nature of how someone gets on the list, or the fact that 280,000 people with no recognized terrorist group affiliation are on the list.
He ominously declared, “This is a matter of national security” . . . yet for some reason, all of those people on the no-fly list and the terror watch list who allegedly represent a national-security threat aren’t being arrested. Earlier yesterday Representative Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at the Department of Homeland Security also “were on the terrorist watch list.”
You know who wasn’t on the no-fly list? The San Bernardino shooters. Nor was the Fort Hood shooter. Nor the Boston bombers. Nor the Chattanooga shooter. In other words, no perpetrator of any major attack on American soil was on the no-fly list.
Yet Obama seemed to think this complete non-sequitur would dispel the national anxiety about his administration’s soporific response to the rise of ISIS and the first attack it inspired on American soil.
You can sign up to join the NRA here. Just in case you were suddenly feeling the need.
‘This Is a Real Problem That Muslims Must Confront, Without Excuse’
How important was this paragraph in Obama’s speech?
That does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse. Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote; to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.
Michael Tomasky thinks was a big deal:
In theater terms, though, there was one new and actually striking part, which came toward the end when he called on Muslims to decry ISIS, or ISIL as he insists on saying. He used the usual liberal language about how most Muslims are great, but he also said that religious fundamentalism is “a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse.” At times he sounded like he was even about to utter the words “radical Islam,” which Democrats for some silly reason have decided they shouldn’t use.
This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge to Muslim Americans, or at least the first time he’s done it in such a public way that it will sink in on the collective public mind that the President said it. That’s actually kind of a huge deal. It says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s okay, because every ethnic and religious group outside the Pilgrims has had to do that earning and fighting. They’ve all faced suspicion, and they’ve all proven that they were better than that. Muslim Americans will have to do the same.
They have, in some way, to take all this into their own hands. They do, to some extent, already. But no one knows they do it, and they need to change that. I still don’t know how even the most intense intra-community vigilance would suss out people like this San Bernardino couple, who fooled everyone in their orbit. But I do know that if other Americans had some sense that Muslim Americans as a group were really working to ferret out the radicalism, then this stalemate might be broken.
Bernie Sanders: You Can’t Make Me Talk About ISIS!
Bernie Sanders seems to resent the suggestion that he has to talk about ISIS after two followers of ISIS commit the biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11.
Sticking once again to his populist economic message in two speeches at New Hampshire universities, Sanders warned that the all-powerful “they” are using ISIS to distract voters away from America’s systemic problems.
“As a nation and as a people, we have got to understand that our country faces a myriad of very serious problems . . . if you turn on the TV, what they now say is, ‘Well we’ve got one problem, it’s ISIS,” Sanders said, launching into a sarcastic impression of the “they” on television this week.
“‘We don’t have to worry about old people not having enough to eat. We don’t have to worry about having more people in jail than any other country. We don’t have to worry about the disappearing middle class. We don’t have to worry about economic and wealth inequality . . . we don’t have to worry about institutional racism, or a broken criminal justice. We don’t have to worry about that. All we should focus on now, 24/7, is ISIS,’” Sanders said.
What channel is he watching? Because that sounds like a really appealing news channel.
“Here’s what I say,” he went on, “I say that ISIS must be destroyed and I say that we have got to build a coalition which destroys ISIS. But I say that we are a great enough country and a smart enough country that we can destroy ISIS at the same time as rebuild a disappearing middle class. We can do both.”
ADDENDA: You can see my appearance on yesterday’s Howard Kurtz’s MediaBuzz on Fox News Channel here.