You might have heard that President Obama went on a rant last week in the aftermath of the Orlando shooting. He was furious! He really let it all hang out.
Now having read that far, one might assume that Obama’s rage was directed at Omar Mateen, the man who murdered 49 people before being killed by police. That seems like the rational target of one’s rage at such a time.
But we’re talking about Barack Obama here, and as always his first priority is to make sure no one is attacking or criticizing him. So no one should be surprised by this assessment by Donald Trump:
“I just listened to President Obama’s comments, and he’s more mad at me than he is at the shooter!”
And yes he is. No one is saying Obama wasn’t horrified by the shooting itself. I’m sure he was. But if you want to see what Obama’s really passionate about, watch what happens when he speaks publicly. We’ve seen it before. In the aftermath of other mass shootings, Obama will get teary and emotional only when he’s expressing his frustration with Republicans over not passing his gun control agenda.
And again this past week, Obama’s tone, inflection and body language betrayed his real passion when he responded to Trump on two points. One was the familiar criticism of Obama’s refusal to identify radical Islam as the enemy. Obama really got animated about this point, insisting that it’s pointless and merely a “political talking point” to actually identify who the enemy is.
The other point was Trump’s proposal to temporarily halt immigration from countries with a history of known terrorism. Obama hates that idea, and he hates that Trump proposed it publicly, because what it demonstrates is that his own refusal to deal with the enemy as it really is has made America more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. It is also because it has to sting when Trump states flatly, “We don’t know what we’re doing, folks.”
Or to put it more succinctly, Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. Not when it comes to immigration. Not when it comes to fighting radical Islam. And certainly not when it comes to responding to these kinds of attacks.
Trump has never suggested permanently banning Muslims from entering the United States, nor does he propose that we permanently ban immigrants from any particular country. What he does say is that we don’t have the slightest idea how to properly vet them right now, and we need to stop just letting them in until we can figure out how to do that.
That upsets Obama because it might mean some prospective immigrants have to wait to get in. The rest of us think it’s more important to prevent more massacres committed at the hands of radical Islamic terrorists.
And Obama is in no position to claim any particular idea can’t work or won’t work, when nothing he does has ever worked. Maybe a good start would be to not only acknowledge radical Islam as the enemy, but to actually believe in his heart that radical Islam is more his enemy than Donald Trump is.
Do you think that’s what Obama believes? His passion, or lack of it, always tells the story.
You might have heard that President Obama went on a rant last week in the aftermath of the Orlando shooting. He was furious! He really let it all hang out.
Now having read that far, one might assume that Obama’s rage was directed at Omar Mateen, the man who murdered 49 people before being killed by police. That seems like the rational target of one’s rage at such a time.
