http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/obamas_willful_blindness.htmlAugust 25, 2014
Obama's Willful Blindness
By Ed Lasky
In America justice is supposed to be blind not our commander-in-chief. In Obama’s topsy-turvy America justice is not blind but our President is-and willfully so-when it comes to threats facing Americans. Will he remove his blinders? Only if he is forced to and by then it may be too late.
Charles Krauthammer, one of America’s smartest columnists, said it best regarding President Obama and the threats to America coming from ISIS:
“I don’t think the issue is the president was unaware or taken by surprise. I think this was willful blindness to the nature of the threat.”
“For the 5 and a half years he’s been in office, he’s tried to minimize the whole idea of the War on Terror,” the columnist explained. “He abolished the term. He gave a speech six months ago saying the War on Terror must end, it’s damaging our country — as if he can unilaterally declare an end to a war when the other guy hasn’t declared an end on his side.”
He has said the tide of war is receding,” Krauthammer continued. “But he did that by defining the threat and the enemy as al-Qaida central, as if the enemy is a club that lives in Pakistan or parts of Afghanistan and that’s it. So whenever you had an explosion of Islamic radicalism in Mali or Libya or elsewhere, it was considered something else, as he said, a jayvee team.”
“This is a willful attempt to actually will away the war that we were looking at.”
Even before Barack Obama became president he whitewashed threats from abroad -- especially those emerging from the Islamic world.
He said back in 2008 that Iran did not pose a serious threat to America and that we do not need to worry about “tiny” countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. He especially dismissed any threat from Iran since that nation spent 1/100th of what America does on defense. Of course, Iran is not tiny at all -- but it has long been known that Barack Obama is geographically challenged (Hawaii, his home state(!), is not in Asia; they don’t speak Austrian in Austria); there are 50, not 57 states. Did Senator Obama not know that Iran had long been designated as the number one state sponsor of terror in the world (so designated by Bill Clinton via one of those executive orders Obama is so addicted to using) and has the blood of many Americans on its hands (its proxies are responsible for the murders of our Marines in Lebanon, our soldiers in Iraq and Saudi Arabia).
As Obama spoke in 2008, Iran had been developing its nuclear weapons program and has throughout the years boasted of goal to destroy America and bring about an apocalypse that would give rise to the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. As recently as two years ago, his mouthpiece, White House spokesman Jay Carney, said Obama was in “no rush” to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and the result of this willful blindness may very well be an Islamist theocracy with a nuclear bomb arsenal.
He has continued to deny reality as President. During his annual pre-Super Bowl interview (please cancel these) he was asked about the prospects of Iran attacking America and responded, “We don’t see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now”. This was a mere two months after Iran was implicated by his own intelligence and Department of Justice officials as being behind assassination plots in Washington, D.C.
Hey, facts don’t matter to Barack Obama.
How do we know facts don’t matter to Barack Obama? Because he avoids them like a plague (or their equivalent in his eyes -- meeting with Republicans, and Democrats for that matter). Facts are his greatest enemy. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen noted something very revealing in this most transparently un-transparent administration: Obama skips more than half of his daily intelligence briefings. Imagine a general just ordering his radar turned off, or a captain switching off his sonar -- or a commander-in-chief resting up for a high-dollar campaign event instead of acting to prevent a (Benghazi) massacre of Americans. All deliberate actions of willful blindness.
If Obama won’t care about facts, why not cut the budget for our intelligence agencies?
How else has he blithely dismissed threats from America?
There are myriad ways, but idly I can recall a sampler platter of them.
Terrorism is magically transformed into an act of workplace violence (Ft. Hood) or called man-made disasters. The words “Islam” or “Muslim” are never to be used in the context of violence, since that would be racist or xenophobic -- it is the hate that dare not speak its name. Instead, his fiction-filled Cairo speech was a paean to the wondrous history of Islam written by Ben Rhodes, a failed short-story writer promoted to Deputy National Security Deputy Adviser.
Obama’s proxies and flacks have followed the company line. Islam is the religion of peace -- a mantra among liberal politicians (Nancy Pelosi called Hamas a “humanitarian organization” for example). The Muslim Brotherhood is mostly secular attests James Clapper-our Director of National Intelligence. He has turned much of our Middle East foreign policy over to Al Jazeera-owning and terror –supporting Qatar and to the anti-Semitic and anti-American de facto dictator of Turkey (and Obama best friend forever) Recep Erdogan . What could go wrong?
Obama willfully dismissed ISIS as a threat, demoting them to JayVee status. Obama has dismissed threats from Al Qaeda repeatedly bragging that Al Qaeda was decimated and on the run on the path to defeat and then defeated -- a claim Obama has made over 30 times. In the real world, Al Qaeda and its offshoot, the JayVee ISIS, now occupy more territory and has far more wealth and power than it ever had before. It is on the run, alright, towards a city and shopping center near you. But rest assured, Obama tells us, they are defeated and the tide of war is receding. He barely reacts but recreates instead. The world is more tranquil than ever before because of Obama’s leadership.
Obama’s willful blindness is chronic. Or part of a con-man strategy by our Storyteller in Chief to convince Americans his presidency has been triumphant, his policies brilliant, that he has never done “stupid sh*t” and he has fundamentally transformed America. Only the latter is true and not in a good way.
Never has the thesaurus been used so often to lull America to sleep (see John F. Kennedy’s, Why England Slept, for a primer on what happens to a nation led by a loser).
He can refuse to secure our borders and ignore threats that open borders are an invitation for terrorists to come and make murder in America. He is willfully blind to the dangers inherent from his de facto open border policy and he and his proxies have tried to import and create millions of future Democrats and disparage critics as inhumane. He can do the same through excessive use of the “refugee” label to allow them to live in America (ask Minnesotans how that has worked for their large population of Somalis -- the Power Line website has been superbly covering this issue for years; the major media, willfully blind like their idol). Americans have already left for and come back from terrorist training camps in the Middle East. For younger people those “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays can certainly be explosive – one hopes just in the metaphorical sense.
Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors -- not out of strength but out of weakness.” He mocked Mitt Romney’s 2012 debate statement that Russia was our geopolitical foe by stating that the “Cold War” is over and recently reiterated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not signify a new Cold War. Former KGB leader turned Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is just like a “bored kid in the back of a schoolroom” Obama reassures us. Does it seem as if Putin is just some “bored kid” leading a “regional power” from a position of weakness? Obama seems to be describing himself more than the marauding Vlad the Impaler. While Obama serenely reassures us all is well on planet Obama he slashed defense spending to feed Leviathan and to create millions of people dependent on Democrats.
Obama is America’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy President” determined not to let reality spoil his life in fantasy camp. Barack Obama is addicted to popular culture and maybe just cannot shake his TV and sports addiction to see the world around him as it is, not how he wants it to be; not as he commands it to be. Or maybe he just does not care what happens to Americans (his empathy deficit is as large as his fiscal deficit; who else golfs, fist bumps and laughs after announcing an American has been beheaded by an evil that dare not speak its name but the world’s biggest-and most successful narcissist?). To recognize danger -- to not be willfully blind -- would require Obama to work, and work is the nastiest four-letter word in Obama’s vocabulary (if Americans don’t realize by now that Obama has a severe work ethic problem, they are the ones who are willfully blind -- maybe that is why many millions of American still support him.)
Does he ever see enemies?
He has tried to sway Americans to ignore, as he has, radical Islam. Instead Obama whitewashed Islamic terror (see the Cairo speech, for just one example) for years.
He sees no enemies abroad; he reserves his harshest rhetoric for fellow Americans (he disdains millions of Americans (see What Obama Thinks of Americans). He has called Republicans “enemies” to be “punished” by Latino voters; at another speech, he called on people to vote for revenge. Republicans, not Muslims, are bomb-throwers, hostage-takers , obstructionists, traitors, and terrorists. If the Israelis had been smarter they would have depicted Hamas as “our Republicans” and then Obama would not have threatened to hold up Hellfire missiles to them during the missile onslaught from real terrorists.
Another possibility arises and it is a dire one. Could Obama’s policies be deliberate -- to weaken an America that he views as the world’s biggest problem, a colonizing, imperialistic and racist power that needs to be permanently stripped of its might? Then he has succeeded where none have ever gone before and fulfilled at least one campaign promise: he has fundamentally transformed America for many decades to come.
We are living in days of infamy.
