Team Obama’s ridiculous Paris remarks highlight its lame mindset on ISIS
Team Obama’s ridiculous Paris remarks highlight its lame mindset on ISIS
By Post Editorial Board November 19, 2015 | 1:14pm
Perhaps the most damning sign of Team Obama’s fundamental frivolousness on ISIS is the nonsense spouted by its top figures.
On Wednesday, the White House press secretary went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and claimed the president deserves the credit for France’s resolute action in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“It is because of [US-French intelligence] cooperation and because of the kind of logistical support that only the United States can provide that France is actually even in a position to ramp up the strikes that they took,” Josh Earnest announced.
Of course, the reason so many targets remain for the French (and Russians) to bomb in the ISIS capital of Raqqa is that Obama’s not bombing much. American sorties are at a fraction of the level of the 2003 or 1991 Iraq wars, the 2001 Afghan campaign or even President Bill Clinton’s Serbia intervention.
And tight US “rules of engagement” leave up to 75 percent of American planes returning to base without dropping a single bomb.
Earnest is plainly desperate to answer the tidal wave of opinion unfavorably comparing Obama with French President François Hollande, such as Andrea Peyser’s column in Monday’s Post, “Hollande is making a weasel of O.” But spin can’t make the facts go away.
And Earnest’s embarrassing comments don’t hold a candle to John Kerry’s disgraceful ones. On Tuesday, the secretary of state suggested Charlie Hebdo had it coming.
Mind you, Kerry was just trying to express the horror of Friday’s attacks. But he did it by comparing them to the January slaughter at the satiric magazine, which he said had “perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘OK, they’re really angry because of this and that.’ ”
It doesn’t matter that Kerry walked back the comment the next day (though without acknowledging he’d misspoken). His first instinct is plainly to look for grievances to explain away terrorism.
The misreading of the terrorist mind is simply astonishing. The men behind Friday’s atrocities in Paris felt every bit as justified as January’s killers — because their sick ideology justifies the slaughter of innocents.
Sadly, none of this idiocy disqualifies Earnest or Kerry from working for a president who, after all, proudly proclaimed ISIS “a JV team.”
nypost.com
