President Obama lives in a world all his own. It's a world in which he's widely beloved but also misunderstood, a world in which everyone is racist except for those who support him, a world in which his foreign policy has been heroically successful and his domestic policy even more so. President Obama lives in Fantasyland.
In this Fantasyland, it's not enough for President Obama to define the world around him in self-serving fashion. He must define his enemies the same way. To that end, while visiting Paris for the Climate Change Summit that will supposedly usher in an era of global cooperation and environmental utopianism, Obama announced that he had finally found a way to defeat Islamic State. Talking about climate change, Obama said, was an "act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us ... What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?"
Not to be Debbie Downer, but nothing in ISIS' plans suggests that they care deeply about preventing a bunch of self-important bureaucrats from meeting in well-stocked, toney hotels to destroy the Western economy on behalf of scientific chimeras. ISIS, in fact, probably adores the notion that the West will take itself down a couple economic pegs in order to redistribute the wealth. Certainly other Islamic terrorists have felt that way. Osama Bin Laden, for example, lamented that the West did not spend more money on climate change relief efforts, and stated according to Al Jazeera, "Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury -- the phenomenon is an actual fact. All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis."
Regardless of ISIS' feelings on global warming, they obviously don't sit around in Raqqa lamenting that their plans have been defeated by those dastardly Westerners and their catered diplomatic lunches. But President Obama says they do. That's because he crafts his own enemies based on who he wishes they were. Obama is thoroughly uncomfortable with the idea that those who wish to fight him are members of radical Islam. He wishes they were right-wing American ideologues. So he simply plays them off as such.
Obama did the same thing with regard to the Iran nuclear deal. While handing Iran $150 billion in funding, opening their economy, and granting them a full nuclear weapons program in a decade, Obama claimed that the real enemies of peace were Republicans siding with Iranian hardliners. Never mind that those hardliners didn't exist. Obama created them magically, and then made them Republicans.
Barack Obama is a leftist hammer in search of a conservative nail. No matter who his enemies actually are, he'll characterize them as American conservatives for purposes of whacking them over the head. ISIS may have slaughtered Westerners in Paris thanks to radical Islam, but Obama will never acknowledge that: instead, he'll just claim that they're essentially Ted Cruz in keffiyehs.
This isn't rare. Jackie Kennedy once lamented that her husband had been shot by a "silly little communist" rather than dying for civil rights; her allies quickly turned JFK's assassination into a referendum on American conservatism. Obama's doing the same thing now. He has chosen his enemies, and they don't include ISIS. That means that if ISIS must be his enemy, he will simply wave his Fantasyland wand, and they will be transformed into the Republican enemies he so craves.
The problem is, they won't. They'll just keep killing. Reality remains reality, no matter how much President Obama sprinkles fairy dust and claps his hands.
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