Posted on the Internet seven hours before Barack Obama’s pathetic Oval Office speech is a scathing denunciation of the premises behind it, from Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest. He notes the increasing evidence that Islamist terrorists have been using refugee flows to infiltrate into Europe and concludes “it’s now crystal clear that one can’t combine a passive foreign policy with a legalistic adherence to absolutist ideals — that, for example, one can turn a blind eye to a disintegrating Middle East and North Africa while opening the gates to every refugee and migrant that the meltdown creates.”
He notes, as if he had seen Obama’s text beforehand, that Western elites “have never been so self-confident” and that they “are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post historical groupthink.” He warns that “as the mass of the people become more aware that the elites are too blind and too wrapped in the coils of elite ideology to deal effectively with society’s most urgent problems, an age of demagogues is opening up around us. People need leaders; when the meritocratic priesthood seems incapable of providing leadership, people start looking elsewhere.”
Like Marine LePen National Front, which won pluralities in France’s regional elections in the north and southeast regions, and Donald Trump.
“Obama: Gun Control, Rejecting Islamophobia Keys to Terror Fight,” proclaims the headline at Slate. It’s all very nice to say you want to welcome all refugees and to say, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch did last week, that the real danger to society is Islamophobia. But most people can see that these responses are pathetically inadequate to government’s first responsibility, which is to protect society against attack. And I suspect that they can see that the president’s demand that Congress pass a law banning gun sales to people on the no-fly terrorist watch list is a pathetic grab for partisan advantage with no relation to actually, you know, stopping terrorists.
Obama’s conceit, apparent since the 2008 campaign, that if he talks emolliently about Islam, then Islamist terrorists will stop hating our way of life and trying to destroy is, has been proven about as conclusively wrong as any assumption in the real world can be. He clings to it nonetheless and wonders why people are not reassured. Which is what we — and decent people all over the world — are stuck with for the next 13 months, the head of a meritocratic priesthood who holds in contempt the “knuckle-draggers” who on these issues are so much more rational and wiser than he is.
