The president’s performance yesterday at the National Defense University was a marvel to behold. It was vintage Obama: His remarks on terrorism were delivered as though from an isolation chamber cut off from all reality.
In other words, the president spoke the way he normally does, as if he were addressing his fellow professors in the Chicago Law faculty lounge.
Thus the opening sneer against George W. Bush on torture, the discussion of root causes such as poverty and hate, the obligatory reference to Vietnam and the most passionate defense reserved for something most of us don’t have a problem with: killing Americans who have taken up arms against their countrymen. Thus too Obama’s obsession with Gitmo, not to mention the startling claim that when it comes to al Qaeda, we are back to the days before 9/11.
Mind you, he said all this — complete with references to civil rights — at a time when the IRS has grossly violated the rights of conservatives and his Justice Department has suggested a Fox News reporter is a criminal. To cap it off, he closed with a line he ripped off from Bush’s surge speech, a reference to how victory in this war will not take the form of a “surrender ceremony on a battleship.”
To sum it all up, what Obama was saying in his speech is this: Bush was wrong to think America had a war on terror; all smart people recognize the best approach is to treat attacks as a matter for law enforcement.
Which explains why five men believed responsible for the attack that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi are still walking around free. Because we’re not going to hunt them down. We are going to let the FBI arrest them and give them their Miranda rights.