Obama cannot tell us why Osama killed 3,000 Americans.
The day after Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden, I wrote the following about President Obama’s re-election prospects:
The spontaneous celebrations will, of course, soon pass. Nevertheless, people will invariably associate bin Laden’s demise with President Obama. As long as that is the case the electorate will be strongly inclined to give Obama another four years in office.
The Obama Administration and its supporters have spared no effort in associating Obama with Osama’s demise even if it was the Navy SEALS who did the heavy lifting.
Vice President Joe Biden has frequently said, “Osama Dead; GM Alive!!!” and did so again at last week’s Democratic National Convention. Also at the DNC, Senator John “America Needs to Pass a Global Test” Kerry said, “Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off now than he was four years ago.”
Obama himself went further than that during his DNC acceptance speech:
I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.
What Obama is suggesting is that our military wasn’t focused on Afghanistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda until he arrived in the Oval Office. It was a typically audacious statement from our audacious President. What Obama doesn’t tell us is that he is doing everything he can to bring the Taliban back to the negotiating table and is willing to release prisoners from Gitmo to do it. Not exactly a profile in courage.
But what else can we expect from our audacious President? After all, on the anniversary of Osama’s killing, Obama’s “Truth Team” put out an ad which suggested that Mitt Romney would not have made the call to kill bin Laden. This, of course, was the ad which featured former President Bill Clinton who said, “The downside would have been horrible for him” had the raid failed. This prompted Veterans for a Safe America to put out an ad which asked, “Horrible for him?” The ad also ran an excerpt from a press conference following the bin Laden killing in which Obama stated, “I said I’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him and I did.”
I did? Why is Obama talking as if he was the one who descended from the helicopter into bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad firing the shot that killed Osama? To borrow a page from Bill Clinton’s book, because he can.
Obama can in no small part due to a sympathetic and sycophantic liberal media that desires his re-election. Yet eight years ago, the liberal media blasted President Bush for using images from the attack on the World Trade Center during his re-election campaign while Democrats took Republicans to task for holding their convention in New York near the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Suppose if bin Laden had been killed under President Bush’s watch. What if it had before the 2004 GOP Convention? What if Rudy Giuliani had said bin Laden wasn’t better off than he was four years ago? What if Dick Cheney had said “bin Laden dead, GM alive”? What if Bush said that Bill Clinton failed to kill bin Laden when he had the opportunity to do so? The liberal media would have accused Republicans of chauvinism, jingoism and blamed them for creating more terrorists. But Obama, Biden, and Kerry are free to boast about Osama’s death to their heart’s content.
Yet for all of Obama’s bragging about killing Osama there are other things he cannot tell us. Obama cannot tell us why Osama issued not one, but two fatwas imploring Muslims to kill Americans wherever they might find them. Therefore he cannot tell us why 19 hijackers put those fatwas into action. The reason for this is because Obama says we are not at war with Islam even if a critical part of it is at war with us. Despite this, the words Islamic terrorism will not be spoken by Obama much less appear in the same sentence.
