Obama threatens to veto bill boosting refugee scrutiny

Help me work this out. We've reached the point where the public takes threats to national security more seriously than the president does. OK, he's a hard-core leftist and they're not, which is why they twice elected Republican Congresses in off-year elections to put a restraining order on his tendencies. I get that. But they also elected and re-elected him, knowing full well - at least the second time - what he was. Or did the media successfully distract them with "binders full of women" and Big Bird and all that nonsense to the point where they really didn't comprehend the decision they were making? OK, I'm starting to digress a little, but this is what it's come to: Both the public and the Congress are concerned about the prospect of terrorists slipping in among the thousands of refugees Obama wants to accept from Syria, and at the very least they want some stronger scrutiny of exactly who's being let in. But there's one person who absolutely refuses to do that under any circumstances and to any degree whatsoever, and that is the very guy they elected president twice. So even a very reasonable bill that would demand we actually know who we're letting in, and what these people's backgrounds are, gets the Obama veto threat.

I'm dumbfounded:

The veto threat came a day ahead of the anticipated vote on Thursday and is clearly an attempt to persuade as many Democrats as possible to oppose the bill to fortify the chances of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. This won't be an easy vote for Democrats because most of the public is telling pollsters they oppose taking more refugees from Syria after one of the Paris jihadists hid among the migrants coming through Greece. This is not because Americans are hard-hearted. No country in human history has taken more refugees from the world's horror shows. Our guess is that the public simply doesn't trust the Administration when it says the refugees will be thoroughly vetted. This is one result of the Administration's disregard for federal immigration law. Mr. Obama's press conference on Monday, in which he denounced anyone who opposed admitting more refugees, also doesn't inspire confidence.

I guess Obama figures he can't afford to open the door even a little in acknowledging there is any potential problem with taking the refugees. If he does, after all, that will demonstrate pretty quickly that there is really no way to reliably get the information we need. Bashar Assad isn't going to cough up these folks' papers, after all. If you only take those who can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are neither radicalized nor affiliated with any group that poses a threat, you're not going to end up taking very many people. In the minds of most Americans, that's not exactly a negative. The goal should not be to get the number of refugees as high as possible. It should be to accept those we can accept without creating a threat to those already living here. If that's only a small number, that's fine. But not to Obama. He's determined to take as many as he can without any filter whatsoever. And that brings us to the most maddening thing about his approach, not only to this issue, but to most issues: He refuses to debate a serious issue in a serious way. To him, it's always about finding the most biting insult to lay on your critics. Republicans aren't concerned about terrorists slipping in among the refugees. No, they're afraid of five-year-olds and widows, and they're religious bigots. Obama knows perfectly well that's not true, and a serious man would discuss the real concerns of the opposition in a serious way. This guy, on the other hand, figures he's won the argument if he's able to unleash the most clever insult. Which brings me back to the question of why a public far more serious about these matters than he is elected him and then re-elected him. I guess there's only one answer: They're not as serious as I'm trying to give them credit for. Otherwise they would have made a better choice.

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