I'll agree with most of this, and I don't believe Obama wanted to even be there. If I had to guess, I think the Democrat leadership has lower an ultimatum on the guy, and this is the only reason he did this. If you couple what he did last night with the report that these terrorist groups are gaining strength that Diann Fienstein shared this morning, well.....

I have no idea why this guy thinks his "lets pretend we are their friends and understand their plight" against our evil ways that caused this.... will work  

President Barack Obama wanted to show he was so serious about the threat posed by ISIL that he gave a speech from the Oval Office about it—standing up.

But afterwards, America knows just about as much what he's doing and what's going on as it did before he scrambled Sunday's prime time schedule with the ultimate presidential prop.


From the spot where George W. Bush spoke the night of Sept. 11, Richard Nixon resigned and John F. Kennedy talked civil rights and the Cuban Missile Crisis (all seated, behind where he stood), Obama looked firmly into the camera and gave America a not-so-peppy pep talk.

His strategy in Syria: working, air strikes and coalition expansion underway.

Law enforcement officials: on the case, sharing intelligence and tracking people down.

Americans: full of resolve.

Scapegoating Muslims: bad.

People had to look somewhere else for how he's going to step up the mission against ISIL, his positions on several related pieces of legislation in Congress or how exactly he thinks that a 13-minute summoning of political theater is going to turn around two-and-a-half weeks of dismissing much of the response since the Paris attacks as overreaction and Republican fear-mongering.

“Is that all there is? We need a new President - FAST!” Republican frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted as Obama finished.

Though perhaps no response said more than Hillary Clinton’s, who didn’t issue any, by Twitter or press release, pro forma or detailed, leaving her comments to the anti-terrorism speech she delivered Sunday in Washington hours before Obama walked into the Oval Office.

Republican presidential candidates, led by Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, used their weekend events and TV interviews to go into bloodthirsty overdrive: “carpet bomb them into oblivion,” Cruz said in Iowa on Saturday. Go after their families, Trump said Sunday morning in an interview on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

"What’s too far? What’s too far?" Trump said. "They are killing people."

“Destroy the caliphate,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”


By contrast, Obama tried to go bloodless, waiting as at other crucial moments of his presidency for comments like that to set the tone—a new CNN/ORC poll shows people disapproving of Obama’s handling of ISIL 64-33 percent and his handling of terrorism 60-34 percent—then built up a high-profile speech to respond, and said close to nothing.

Meanwhile, a sense of panic has set in that’s less like last year’s sci-fi horror movie cable news frenzy over Ebola, more like a frightening new reality where everyone everywhere feels like they could be mowed down or blown up by someone shouting Allahu Akbar. A measure of how far things have tilted: that same CNN/ORC poll shows that 53 percent of people say they now want to send new ground troops in to fight ISIL.

Obama's cool, calm "I got this" air helped get him elected in 2008. Seven years later, it’s clear that many Americans don’t want reassurance, but want him to convey the sense of urgency that they’re feeling. Aides were hoping that he’d be able to.

Giving the speech from the Oval Office “conveys the seriousness with which we are taking the issue,” a senior administration official said Sunday afternoon, ahead of Obama’s remarks. Americans would see Obama in “a familiar and appropriate venue,” the official said, “from the place where he makes his decisions.”

But he didn’t announce any of those decisions on Sunday. And the four minutes he spent during the Oval Office address explaining what he thinks Americans should do were shorter on details and passion than the four minutes he spent saying what he thinks Americans shouldn’t do.

“We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,” Obama said. “That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.”

The irony is that, rhetoric aside, while Americans say they seriously disapprove of Obama’s performance on terrorism, few Republicans or Democrats have proposed anything substantively different from what Obama's doing in Syria.

That’s not all: he’s been waiting since February for Congress to move on his updated Authorization of Military Force that he called for again Sunday. He acknowledged again on Sunday the uncomfortable truth that no solution or strategy can account for every angry or crazed person willing to die who connects with murderous ideology on the Internet or directly in their lives. And most people do seem to agree that stepping up the gun control laws, with or without the specifics out of San Bernardino, would make sense.

And the new CNN/ORC poll aside, no one really argues Obama's right both that Americans don’t really want another war in the Middle East—and that ISIL does.

“We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria,” Obama said. ISIL knows “that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops and draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.”

All of what underlies Obama's speech Sunday night may be true. So is his failure to move the country without finding stronger language or more palpable results.

To his critics, Obama’s remarks were as predictable as their responses.

“President Obama’s address tonight failed to obscure what has become increasingly clear to the American people: that we are not winning the war against ISIL, and that the threat of terrorism against our homeland is real and growing,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in a lengthy statement emailed to reporters just minutes after Obama finished speaking.

“The horrific events of recent weeks remind us that any hope to contain ISIS has been a failure,” added House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). “Until we hear from the president what more can be done—with our military, our intelligence-gathering, and our international partners—we will remain one step behind our enemy.”


Congress, of course, doesn’t have a lot of its own credibility on fighting terrorism. The AUMF isn’t the only piece of legislation that’s been waiting around for months. Last week in Paris, Obama’s press secretary and deputy national security adviser took time out of a press briefing that was supposed to focus on the climate conference Obama was attending to call for the Hill to pass fixes to the visa waiver program and a gun ban for the no-fly list. Obama pressed those points himself Sunday night, insisting that the kind of attack him through press release mentality (“tough talk, or abandoning our values or giving into fear”) certainly doesn’t help, and probably hurts.

“That's what groups like ISIL are hoping for,” he said.

Obama received some back-up for that.

“Those who instantly criticize any strategy have an obligation to tell you their strategy (and the costs, duration, risks),” tweeted Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.).

If Obama’s goal was to reassure people, he doesn’t seem to have managed that. If his goal was to raise the worries out of the political debate, he fell short there too. If he was looking to appeal to deeper thinking than comes out of most elected officials, that also didn’t happen.

“Two things missing,” Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass wrote on Twitter, “intensification of military strategy; preparing Americans for additional domestic acts of terrorism.”

And if he was looking to head into his final year in office with the same kind of defining momentum he mustered this time last year instead of just seeming like he’s still coming late to the mentality that he once criticized George W. Bush for, that didn’t happen either.

“The president does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,’" John Brennan, then his homeland security adviser and now his CIA director, said in the heady early days of August 2009.

“Our nation,” Obama said Sunday night, “has been at war with terrorists since al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11.”



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obama-terrorism-san-bernardino-oval-off...

Go back. Look at the list of countries that General Wesley Clark provided. Look at the foreign policies. The end results. Destabilize a region, create a flood of refugees. Who benefits from such asinine behavior? After 9/11, regardless of where they came from, Iraq had to be invaded. A/stan, and
Ohh, Gadhafi is a bad person, we Must involve ourselves, we Must save those poor people from Him! Yet, they had the highest standard of living in all Africa. He rode through the streets, standing up, while guns were all around, yet Our president won't be in a place with armed military, OUR military.

Just how exactly is it that the Reasons for Being in Syria are so recently found, yet, military action against Syria was decided before the General Wesley Clark list was made public?
How else could Syria be on the list without them being targeted?
Maybe he Got the list the day it was conceived, but ThAt day was plenty prior to the
Justification
for our involvement.