Patterico's Pontifications

9/10/2014

Liar in Chief to Lie at Length Tonight

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:33 am



Regardless of what you think we should do, if anything, to combat ISIS, one thing is clear: Obama is a giant liar:

The comment that has caused Mr. Obama the most grief in recent days was his judgment about groups like ISIS. In an interview last winter with David Remnick of The New Yorker, Mr. Obama sought to make the point that not every terrorist group is a threat like Al Qaeda, requiring extraordinary American action.

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Remnick. He drew a distinction between Al Qaeda and “jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Asked about that by Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” last weekend, Mr. Obama denied that he necessarily meant ISIS. “Keep in mind I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL,” he said, using an alternate acronym for the group.

“I’ve said that regionally, there were a whole series of organizations that were focused primarily locally — weren’t focused on homeland, because I think a lot of us, when we think about terrorism, the model is Osama bin Laden and 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. And some groups evolve, he noted. “They’re not a JV team,” he added of ISIS.

But the transcript of the New Yorker interview showed that Mr. Obama made his JV team comment directly after being asked about terrorists in Iraq, Syria and Africa, which would include ISIS. After Mr. Obama’s initial answer, Mr. Remnick pointed out that “that JV team just took over Fallujah,” a city in western Iraq seized by ISIS. Mr. Obama replied that terrorism in many places around the world was not necessarily “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”

Journalistic organizations like PolitiFact, Factcheck.org and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker all rejected the contention that Mr. Obama was not referring to ISIS when he made his comment about JV teams.

That’s in the New York Times. You should read it all. The whole piece is brutal and worth your time.

Other things that are clear regardless of what you think should happen:

*Congress should take responsibility for introducing a declaration of war resolution and voting it up or down. But won’t.

*Wars increase the power of the state, and give the state a reason to inflate the currency and go even further into debt. They also often lead to unintended consequences. This does not necessarily mean that one must reject military action on ISIS — but they are factors to keep in mind as you contemplate the Grand Strategy that will be laid out by the Liar in Chief.

UPDATE: Link fixed. Sorry about that.


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