My column from today's LDR:
President Obama admitted this week that he has no strategy for dealing with ISIS. That means he never has had a strategy for dealing with them, he’s just been leading us on. In the meantime, the membership of ISIS continues to grow, crushing everything that gets in their way, whether it be cities or historic monuments or people.
The number of fighters in the ranks of ISIS as of this time is all over the place, ranging from the CIA’s estimate of 31,500 to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani’s estimate of 200,000.
Obama keeps passing the buck to the Pentagon, but Pentagon spokesmen say they are waiting on the president. And rightly so. I guess it’s my Bible study training from my years as a pastor, but I always go back to the origins of words to get an accurate meaning. “Strategy” in the Greek language means “the art of being a troop leader; the office of general or commander, and refers to a high level plan of achieving one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty”.
So there you go, Mr. President. This is your job and as far as most Americans are concerned, you only have one job and that is to keep America safe.
The thing that most of us don’t understand is how can he not have a strategy of dealing with an evil force that has kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery thousands of women and children, and beheaded or burned alive hundreds of men, most of them Christians, while at the same time here in America he has a strategy for everything else.
From the very beginning of his first presidential campaign, he was just full of strategies, most of them centering around his goal of “transforming America”. While some of us read between the lines of that rather innocuous sounding phrase and realized the portent thereof, apparently enough voters were so enamored of voting for the first black president and/or receiving a free cell phone or that infamous “Obama money” that they never looked any farther down the road.
We learned just this week about his strategy to take over our neighborhoods, making HUD the sole designer and planner of all communities, and bypassing local zoning boards, giving HUD officials the power to regulate and enforce by withholding money from any communities which do not fall into step.
We are currently living with his “strategy” to put the entire health care system of our country under the control of Department of Health and Human Services. How’s that working out for you? We still have 31 million uninsured under that disastrous strategy and in the meantime many have lost their doctor and/or their hospital and still have no insurance.
And now we await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the next week or so with regard to whether the government can continue to give tax credits on some of the Obamacare policies, a decision which could potentially cripple or even void the entire health care bill.
Then there’s his strategy of coping with the greatest disaster the world will ever have to face - global warming. Secretary of State Kerry calls it a national security threat and even went so far as to say it is perhaps the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction”.
The president spoke to the 2015 graduates of the Coast Guard at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, telling them that global warming was an immediate risk to our national security. I watched him give that speech on television and I could see the fear and tension on the faces of the young men and women in the graduating class. They weren’t listening to him of course. They were wondering what kind of world they were going out to face under the threats of international Islamic terrorism and who was going to be helping them fight those battles while the president was so engaged in his own little war against climate change.
The president certainly has a strategy for handling the problem of illegal immigration. He calls it his pen and phone strategy whereby he rubs the Aladdin lamp of his executive order power and everything just falls into place. He’s used to people doing what he tells them to do so why would it be any different with the illegal immigration problem?
But again, something happened on the way to full employment with medical and retirement benefits for all the illegal aliens he has ushered into the country when a U.S. District Judge in Texas declined to lift his injunction blocking the administration’s action to defer deportations for more than four million people already here illegally.
He even has a strategy to nationalize local police departments. His executive order issued on December 18, 2014, gives him the power to establish a President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
We have an old saying here in the Ozarks: People always find a way to do what they really want to do. The current tenant in the White House simply does not want to deal with foreign policy, or foreign leaders. He ignores Vladimir Putin’s aggressive moves toward even our own ships and airplanes. He ignores the record of Iran’s leadership and failure to keep promises even as he proceeds to attempt to work out a nuclear deal with them. (Yes, he does have a strategy for that.)
He ignores our long standing relationship with Israel and our other allies in favor of trying to establish his own legacy of making peace with Iran, which isn’t going to happen no matter how much he wants it to. And it appears that his strategy with regard to his lack of experience in dealing with foreign policy is just to leave it to the next President to deal with.
President Obama admitted this week that he has no strategy for dealing with ISIS. That means he never has had a strategy for dealing with them, he’s just been leading us on. In the meantime, the membership of ISIS continues to grow, crushing everything that gets in their way, whether it be cities or historic monuments or people.
The number of fighters in the ranks of ISIS as of this time is all over the place, ranging from the CIA’s estimate of 31,500 to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani’s estimate of 200,000.
Obama keeps passing the buck to the Pentagon, but Pentagon spokesmen say they are waiting on the president. And rightly so. I guess it’s my Bible study training from my years as a pastor, but I always go back to the origins of words to get an accurate meaning. “Strategy” in the Greek language means “the art of being a troop leader; the office of general or commander, and refers to a high level plan of achieving one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty”.
So there you go, Mr. President. This is your job and as far as most Americans are concerned, you only have one job and that is to keep America safe.
The thing that most of us don’t understand is how can he not have a strategy of dealing with an evil force that has kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery thousands of women and children, and beheaded or burned alive hundreds of men, most of them Christians, while at the same time here in America he has a strategy for everything else.
From the very beginning of his first presidential campaign, he was just full of strategies, most of them centering around his goal of “transforming America”. While some of us read between the lines of that rather innocuous sounding phrase and realized the portent thereof, apparently enough voters were so enamored of voting for the first black president and/or receiving a free cell phone or that infamous “Obama money” that they never looked any farther down the road.
We learned just this week about his strategy to take over our neighborhoods, making HUD the sole designer and planner of all communities, and bypassing local zoning boards, giving HUD officials the power to regulate and enforce by withholding money from any communities which do not fall into step.
We are currently living with his “strategy” to put the entire health care system of our country under the control of Department of Health and Human Services. How’s that working out for you? We still have 31 million uninsured under that disastrous strategy and in the meantime many have lost their doctor and/or their hospital and still have no insurance.
And now we await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the next week or so with regard to whether the government can continue to give tax credits on some of the Obamacare policies, a decision which could potentially cripple or even void the entire health care bill.
Then there’s his strategy of coping with the greatest disaster the world will ever have to face - global warming. Secretary of State Kerry calls it a national security threat and even went so far as to say it is perhaps the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction”.
The president spoke to the 2015 graduates of the Coast Guard at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, telling them that global warming was an immediate risk to our national security. I watched him give that speech on television and I could see the fear and tension on the faces of the young men and women in the graduating class. They weren’t listening to him of course. They were wondering what kind of world they were going out to face under the threats of international Islamic terrorism and who was going to be helping them fight those battles while the president was so engaged in his own little war against climate change.
The president certainly has a strategy for handling the problem of illegal immigration. He calls it his pen and phone strategy whereby he rubs the Aladdin lamp of his executive order power and everything just falls into place. He’s used to people doing what he tells them to do so why would it be any different with the illegal immigration problem?
But again, something happened on the way to full employment with medical and retirement benefits for all the illegal aliens he has ushered into the country when a U.S. District Judge in Texas declined to lift his injunction blocking the administration’s action to defer deportations for more than four million people already here illegally.
He even has a strategy to nationalize local police departments. His executive order issued on December 18, 2014, gives him the power to establish a President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
We have an old saying here in the Ozarks: People always find a way to do what they really want to do. The current tenant in the White House simply does not want to deal with foreign policy, or foreign leaders. He ignores Vladimir Putin’s aggressive moves toward even our own ships and airplanes. He ignores the record of Iran’s leadership and failure to keep promises even as he proceeds to attempt to work out a nuclear deal with them. (Yes, he does have a strategy for that.)
He ignores our long standing relationship with Israel and our other allies in favor of trying to establish his own legacy of making peace with Iran, which isn’t going to happen no matter how much he wants it to. And it appears that his strategy with regard to his lack of experience in dealing with foreign policy is just to leave it to the next President to deal with.
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