Barack Obama is drawing leadership inspiration from strange places. First, his continued appeasement of Islamic nations rivals the strategy of Neville Chamberlain. Now, Obama's obsessions with secondary matters like health care and gays in the military cast him in the role of Emperor Nero from the first century.
In 64 A.D., Nero became famous for “fiddling as Rome burned.” Whether that image is factually accurate matters not. It is still the single image that defines Nero and his reign. The image of Nero remains emblazoned in the mind of every history student: distracted by his own pleasures and priorities from the real danger and destruction consuming his own Roman people in the great fire. Ultimately, Nero chose to blame Christians for the disaster in order to take the heat, so to speak, off himself and his distracted leadership.
Emperor Nero meet President Barack Obama. Just as Nero was the youngest emperor to be named when he became such at the tender age of sixteen, so too President Obama is the youngest president in the last fifty years. Like Nero before him, Obama's inexperience is showing, as is his deafness to the real priorities and needs of the people he purports to lead.
A fire is slowly building throughout America as Islamic terrorists flood through our porous borders, and even enter legally through our own immigration process. Meanwhile, Obama focuses his attention and squanders his political capital on health care and gays in the military. That fire feeds and grows as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged in a May 21 memo that we have seen more terror attacks in the past nine months than in any previous twelve month period and that such attacks are growing at an increasing rate. By my count, in 2009 alone, 80 Muslim terrorists (mostly men between the ages of 20 and 40) were charged, convicted, or sentenced on terrorism charges in America. If the DHS is correct, we can expect that number to grow still higher in 2010. Still, Obama focuses his attention and gaze on the crucial, all-important subject of gays serving openly in the military.
Obama's inattention and disregard for the concerns of the American people (and the nation itself) represents the embodiment of poor leadership. Have a collapsing economy? We'll “reform” health care. Have a gushing oil spill? We'll ensure that homosexuals can serve their country with “honesty.” The presidential disconnect is obvious.
But while that disconnect may be slightly less obvious to the naked eye when it comes to national security and the threat of Islamic terror, it is precisely on this topic that the disconnect becomes most dangerous.
Again, when it becomes obvious to Janet Napolitano and DHS that our open borders are serving as a magnetic welcome mat to radical Islamists, we have a problem. Most of us already knew that; the DHS has arrived late to the game but at least they are now present. With two official notifications last week, the DHS signaled that the problem is growing and ominous.
First, the DHS sent word to local Texas authorities to be on the lookout for Mohamed Ali, a Saudi bomb expert and terrorist who is reported to be making his way across the invitational Mexican border that the federal government refuses to seal or even notice. In sending that message, the DHS also acknowledged that a number of terrorists, particularly ones related to Somalia's terror group, al-Shabaab, have been targeting our southern border and covertly entering our nation to sow havoc and mayhem.
Next, the DHS issued a memo on May 21 to warn law enforcement officials that the accelerating rate of terror attacks on our own soil is expected to continue and that we are limited in our ability to anticipate said attacks. Why? Because the terror lovers are morphing to use lone wolves and free agents in random attacks on less secure targets. Where might these lone wolves come from? Through our own porous borders.
In other words, we know the problem and we know the source. We just merely refuse to do anything about it. Instead, Nero(bama) fiddles. We know the borders are an open invitation to terrorists, but we refuse to seal them. We know our legal immigration process still accept young men who meet the profile of terrorists-to-be, and we refuse to remedy it. Our federal government has other priorities of its own as the fire slowly builds around us.
As David Goldman has rightly noted, President Obama clings to a deep sentimental attachment to the Muslim world that stems from his childhood. Rather than recognizing the threat that Islamic terror presents, Obama fiddles. He dogmatically insists on the majesty and greatness of the Muslim world and revels in its contributions to the world. Never mind that globalization and technological advance have left Muslim countries virtually untouched. President Obama seems ignorant of the fact that, according to the World Bank estimate, the total non-fossil fuel exports of the entire combined Muslim world amount to less than those of Finland, a nation of just five million people. Islamic loves produce many things, just not wealth, freedom, or other core American values.
Worse, his three top terror advisors cling to his same fantasies about the religion of peace and tolerance. Attorney General Eric Holder cannot bring himself to acknowledge in questioning before Congress that the terror attacks we are facing originate in “radical Islam.” Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano no longer uses the term “terror,” instead preferring to insist that we are under siege from “man-caused disasters.” And senior terror advisor John Brennan now lectures the American people that “jihad” is just misunderstood and is really a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” Where did Obama find these people? And with what virus have they been infected?
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