No Naps for the War-Weary
By Wesley Pruden
WashingtonTimes.com
It’s a little early for the candidates of ‘16 to
start calling each other names, but they’re
loosening tongues, limbering voices and auditioning
invective, anyway.
Rand Paul calls
Hillary Clinton “a war hawk,” eager to get
America into another war in the Middle East, and
Miss Hillary sends out a surrogate to remind
everyone that the senator from Kentucky is a man of
“fringe, isolationist vision.”
War hawks and isolationists are fascinating
critters, to be sure, but everyone has to pay close
attention just now to the terror at hand, the threat
posed by the Islamic State, which everyone calls
ISIS for the initials of one of its former names.
But President
Obama wants everyone not to worry.
Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security
adviser, was dispatched to say the president has got
the barbarians’ number. Stay cool, everyone. (If
only.)
The
White House is monitoring everything closely, he
says, and if ISIS gives any hint of plotting against
the United States, “we’ll be prepared to deal with
that as necessary.” The president will put aside his
putter, sprint in from the back nine and make a
speech.
He’ll remind all that everyone is “appalled” by the
beheading of Jim Foley, which “shocked the
conscience of the world.” Who knew “the world” had a
conscience? The “world” has stood by throughout
history while barbarians like ISIS have visited
cruelty, savagery and sadistic mayhem on the planet.
The president, taking on the robes of a theologian,
says that “no just God would stand for what they
did, and for what they do every single day.” Who
knew that a mere president, important as a president
may be, so easily monitors the mind of God? (Has the
National Security Agency, which got caught earlier
reading Angela Merkel’s mail, expanded its reach
into the great beyond?) But there’s no need to panic
at the feet of the barbarians. “People like this
ultimately fail,”
Mr. Obama says.
This would have been small solace to Jim Foley as he
waited for the barbarian’s knife. A wiser theologian
than the president would understand that God helps
those who help themselves, guided by faith.
This president’s reassurance sounds like “more mush
from the wimp,” as a Boston newspaper famously
described reassurances from Jimmy Carter in an eon
swiftly fading behind us.
Mr. Obama says that “one thing we can all agree
on is that a group like [ISIS] has no place in the
21st century.” ISIS actually looks real enough,
confident of its place in the new century, where it
can fester and grow like a runaway carbuncle unless
an exceptional nation comes along to demolish it.
Words are cheap, and the president buys them by the
kilo, deeply discounted.
Mr. Paul, who doesn’t have
Barack Obama’s gift for assembling words in
eloquent order, nevertheless appears to share the
Obama vision of a president who feels a duty to
relax and take it easy on bad guys.
Mr. Paul worries that if the Democrats nominate
“a war hawk” like
Hillary, it would set up “a transformational
election.” But a war hawk who gets a telephone call
from Benghazi at 3 o’clock in the morning does not
go back to sleep.