“Nobody who sets foot in America goes through more screening than refugees… And …Our humanitarian duty to help desperate refugees and our duty to our security — those duties go hand in hand.”
Tuesday from the White House the President utter those two little rhetorical gems.
They were buried of course in a much longer narrative of rhetoric that dealt with many bloviated expressions of feigned support for France, the war against the Islamic State, and of course, efforts to curb global warming.Most of the media universe picked up on what a “powerful rebuke” it will be “to the terrorists” for he–President Obama–to attend a global warming summit next week.
Exactly why he thinks radical Islamists who would like to severe his head from his shoulders care one ounce about the issue of global warming–especially since we’ve been in a cooling cycle for 18 years–is a bit hard to explain.
But in the President’s world, leading can be done from behind, ending a war is the same as winning one, and containing ISIS means they’ve now grown to 20 additional countries as opposed to the two they started in.
But that “powerful rebuke” aside, it was my feeling that the two assertions above were actually far bigger problems for the American people.
Arguing that refugees are screened so closely that we wouldn’t be able to miss catching bad guys coming under a false cover of being a faux refugee or asylee is on its face laughable.Maxim Lott exposes the underbelly of that assumption and points out the uncomfortable truth that the Kentucky IED, Boston bombing, and Fort Dix Six, and others have included refugees and asylees (who are here under the same conditions.)
That claim however is still to me the less worrisome of Mr. Obama’s assertions.
From the quote above it is clear that the President draws a moral equivalence between admitting, settling, and resourcing refugees in America and protecting the citizenry of America from terrorism.
He even asserts as much in the claim. While knowing that in not screening refugees as thoroughly as possible to properly vet before admission he runs the risk of violating national security directly.
From the text of the Constitution, to the halls of Congress, to the men and women in uniform, to the man and woman on Main Street — it is my belief that most would be shocked to learn that an American President could even think that admitting refugees (under any circumstances), in terms of priorities, could consider to even be close–much less be seen as EQUAL to–the sacred calling of protecting America from her enemies both foreign and domestic.But then again this is the thinking of the guy who said this week the most powerful weapon that we can yield against the terrorists (wasn’t guns, missles, jets, or nukes) was to look them in the eye and tell them “we’re not afraid.”
Right before his State Department told Americans globally to be very, very afraid to travel (anywhere in the world) on the biggest travel week of the year.
Um… Okay, I guess?
#ObamaSpeakMakesNoSense
UPDATE: We discussed it on-air…
