Ignore The Obvious, Ignore The Facts, Don't Worry, Be Happy--The Mantra Of The Obama Administration

Does Obama really think it can’t happen here?

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Personal Liberty News Desk

Mouthpieces for the Obama administration spent part of their weekend news junket telling America it’s unlikely that ISIS could stage a Paris-style attack on U.S. soil. Almost everyone who’s not on the White House payroll immediately disagreed.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said that the Islamic State’s terrorist aspirations on U.S. soil makes for an apples-and-oranges comparison, viewed alongside the spectacular attack last week in Paris.

Rhodes “told reporters that one big difference between the situation in Europe and that in the U.S. is that ‘thousands’ of fighters have traveled to Syria and then returned to Europe,” reports CNN. “The number being tracked in America is far smaller — around 40, according to an estimate by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper earlier this year.”

In a syndicated report, CNN said the Obama administration is trying to assure Americans that ISIS’ ability to stage a large-scale, coordinated attack in the United States “is limited.”

As soon as those statements went public, everyone from law enforcement to members of the mainstream press — including CNN’s own Jake Tapper, who interviewed Rhodes — did a double-take.

“If this is what ISIS looks like ‘contained,’ I shudder to think what ISIS looks like ‘uncontained,’” said Tapper, referencing President Obama’s unfortunately timed remarks, given only a day before last Friday’s attack. “We don’t seem to be one step ahead of any terrorist group these days.”

New York police commissioner Bill Bratton, who knows a thing or two about working under a progressive leftist administration, said Monday he doesn’t buy the White House line that ISIS can’t wreak massive violence on Americans where they live.

“[D]o you disagree with the White House, who this past weekend seemed to say that an attack on the United States wasn’t possible?” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asked Bratton. “They [the Obama administration] said they [ISIS] didn’t have the capability to attack here.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Bratton replied. “We work every day based on the premise that they have that capability. What we just saw in Paris, why do we think that wouldn’t happen here?”

Obama has been stubbornly reluctant to acknowledge the Islamic State’s reach. He sniped at a reporter Monday for asking whether the president really understands the Islamic State “well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland,” and continues to emphasize a “hate the sin; not the sinner” approach to Islamist extremism.

But naming the enemy — as well as its ideology — and recognizing his ability to cause harm is nothing but simple good sense, as Examiner’s Kareem Grant observed Monday.

It’s “not fear mongering” to admit that to the American people, writes Grant; it’s “simply stating the facts, because the fact of the matter is that terrorist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, the group responsible for killing 2,000 people in Nigeria, are becoming a dangerous threat to the world, and it’s time to stop living in a land of false comfort and acknowledge this threat.”

There Are Similarities Between Ferguson, MO and Fallujah, Iraq. They Are Not As Un-Related As One Might Think.

Never mind the cop-out liberal BS about “root causes” Poverty, Racism, Bad schools, Fatherless families, etc., etc..

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Of Ferguson, Mo.  and Fallujah, Iraq

(Fallujah is a city in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, 43 mi west of Baghdad on the Euphrates. In January 2014, a variety of sources reported that the city was controlled by Al-Qaeda and/or its affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS; sometimes called ISIL). It had been re-taken after a gargantuan effort by US Forces had the area neutralized and safe. Unfortunately, the area was turned back to Iraqi forces to govern but reverted very quickly to terrorist control) jsk

By the brilliant BRET STEPHENS

The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 19, 2014

Bill Bratton has no doubt as to what went wrong with policing in the US in the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s. “The biggest mistake,” he insists, was too much “focus on response to crime and not enough focus on trying to prevent it.”

In a lengthy Monday morning interview with The Wall Street Journal, New York’s top cop refuses to be drawn into second-guessing his colleagues in Ferguson, Mo. When I ask about the seeming militarization of police forces in the US, he replies that each community “equips its police based on the needs for its city.” If people can lawfully own Kalashnikov-style weapons, the cops inevitably are going to go one better.

What Mr. Bratton mainly wants to underscore is that crime in the Big Apple continues to plumb historic lows, never mind recent tabloid headlines. He wants to underscore, also, the reason for it: “broken-windows” policing methods. Such is his belief in broken windows that he comes to the meeting flanked by the man who helped come up with the idea: George Kelling, the legendary criminologist.

Broken windows stresses that endemic criminality is not primarily a function of the usual “root causes”—poverty, racism, bad schools, broken families and so on. The real problem is disorder itself.

“Disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence,” Mr. Kelling observed in a seminal 1982 Atlantic article, co-written with the late James Q. Wilson. The mere appearance of disorder—graffiti, broken windows, an abandoned car, drug dealers or prostitutes openly plying their trades—creates a sense that nobody’s looking, nobody cares, nobody is in charge. Bad guys respond to these environmental cues by acting badly. Good people stay off the street, bolt their doors, move out.

Ferguson is hardly the most dangerous neighborhood in St. Louis County; rates of violent crime are just below the national median, and far below those of East St. Louis, probably the most violent neighborhood in America.

But there is disorder in Ferguson. The city has 190 crimes per square mile, compared with a national median of 39.3. If you live in Ferguson, you are nearly twice as likely to have your car stolen, get mugged, or have your house broken into, than if you live in Averageville, USA Before last week, the biggest story out of Ferguson was the case of a woman who had opened a strip club/brothel in the basement of her home. Her 16-year-old son had the job of tending bar.

This was the environment in which police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed teenager Michael Brown. Whatever the exact circumstances of Brown’s death, everything else about the case suggests a town where broken-windows policing was not being done, or at least not done well. A sense of insecurity and disorder. A police force badly out of step with the community it ostensibly serves. Reactive law enforcement.

At the Journal, Mr. Bratton made a point of emphasizing the nine principles of policing laid down in the 19th century by Sir Robert Peel, founder of London’s Metropolitan Police. Principle No. 9: “The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.” By this standard, policing in Ferguson has been a total failure.

II Which brings me to Fallujah.

Last October I wrote a column with the headline “Iraq Tips Toward the Abyss.” It was prompted by the news that 7,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed over the previous 10 months alone.

“Americans may think they’ve changed the channel on Iraq, but the grisly show goes on,” I wrote. “Pay attention before it gets worse.” The world yawned and the Obama administration did nothing.

In January came the news that a group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham had retaken Fallujah, just 40 or so miles west of Baghdad, a city that US Marines had liberated a decade earlier at a major cost in lives. The media ran a few stories about the heartache of the battle’s veterans. President Obama said nothing.

In July, ISIS took Mosul and seized six divisions worth of US supplied Iraqi military equipment. For once, President Obama took public notice but waited another month before doing anything, ostensibly because he disapproved of the leadership in Baghdad. That was around the time Kurdistan nearly fell to ISIS and the Yazidis were nearly wiped out.

This is a case study of allowing neighborhoods to decay and disorder to fester; of doing things reactively, not preventively. Where would we be in Iraq today if Mr. Obama hadn’t simply walked and looked away for the past three years?

The answer to disorder is to provide order. To engage community leaders. To enforce norms. To reassure good citizens that their security is being looked after and it’s not every man for himself. To maintain a visible presence that deters would-be lawbreakers from committing criminal acts. To prevent bad people from acting badly, and to punish them swiftly when they do.

This is how a successful police force like the NYPD works. And it’s how a competent foreign policy should operate. Bill Bratton knows his job—which is more than can be said of the Keystone cops in Ferguson, or at the White House.

Obama’s foreign policy is disastrously reactive—like the police response in Ferguson, Mo

- See more at: http://israel-commentary.org/?p=9780#sthash.RieEpx6s.dpuf