The news media is fairly sure that a man who lived in a shack in rural Colorado, who terrified his neighbors and routinely attracted the attention of law enforcement, was definitely motivated solely by a swath of videos depicting Planned Parenthood officials “donating” baby brains over glasses of merlot, when he shot a bunch of people in the general vicinity of a Planned Parenthood facility. Our elected leaders, though, have been more careful about ascribing the actions of a madman to talk radio hosts and bloggers.
Just kidding. A bunch of liberals have been flooding the airwaves with calls to censor pro-life speech at “hateful rhetoric” (though I have yet to hear any of them explain why they were so careful to distance radical Islam from the Paris attacks), and this morning, speaking in Paris, the President himself took the opportunity of a “climate change” press conference to address the situation in Colorado, even though no one asked him to. Addressing a crowd of people standing just miles away from where around 120 people were gunned down in an act of terror previously unrivaled in France, Obama bemoaned how acts of gun violence never happen anywhere outside the US.
There are two ways to understand this statement. One, President Obama has literally no idea what he’s talking about and is just reading lines off his TelePrompTer once again, without regard to how such a statement would play in a country that just suffered a significant attack of gun violence, and without much regard for facts, like that Paris has strict gun control laws like the ones Obama wants to implement here to fight our gun violence problem.
The other, more sinister understanding, assuming the President does realize that the Paris attacks are, indeed, acts of gun violence, is that Barack Obama truly thinks that what happened in Colorado near a Planned Parenthood is the direct equivalent of the Paris terror attacks, even though one was committed by a madman and appears to be a random act of violence unconnected to, well, much of anything given what he’s told police, and the other is the work of a multi-national terrorist organization with designs on a world domination and the eventual apocalypse.
I tend to think, difficult as it is, that it’s the latter. The President went on to say:
“We are rightly determined to prevent terrorist attacks wherever they occur whether in the United States or with friends and allies like France, and we devote enormous resources and properly so to rooting out networks and debilitating organizations like ISIL and maintaining the intelligence.”
Obviously, we collect intelligence on all sorts of threats, both foreign and domestic, but the attendant operations are by no means the same in scope, nor should the be addressed in any similar way. While a domestic terrorist like the one that shot up the Colorado strip mall might leave a paper trail of threats and earn the watchful eye of the FBI, ISIS has to be addressed in a way that takes into account a number of factors, including that it controls land, has a multi-national system, and well-defined set of goals. When we lump the two into one category, assuming both are “terrorists,” we give neither type of threat the attention it deserves. Sure, both types of threats might grow serious beards and make their homes in mountaintop shacks, with only goats for friends, but they’re very different otherwise.
It behooves Obama to ignore that they’re different, of course, lest he be forced to face global terrorism – Islamic terrorism – head on. Should he admit that they have different motivations, strategies and executions, he would be forced to admit that his overall strategy, which, apparently, includes “giving it to the terrorists” by attending a posh Paris conference, is misguided at best.
