What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (32 page)

In other words, for not being George W. Bush.

In a spasm of politically correct white guilt, the committee did what the International Olympic Committee did not: reward Obama for being, well, Obama. Just days before the Nobel Committee let the world know that they were idiots as well as leftists, Obama jetted to Copenhagen, Denmark, to lobby the IOC to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. With Oprah in tow, Barry made his case and begged the IOC. Michelle referred to their participation on the taxpayer-funded European junket as a “sacrifice.”

In the end, the IOC was impressed with neither Obama’s “sacrifice” nor the Queen of All Media, because they awarded the Games to Rio de Janeiro instead.

Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, however, was, the logical result of Obama’s International Apology Tour. As the
New York Times
put it in their editorial about the prize: “Countering the ill will Mr. Bush created around the world is one of Mr. Obama’s great achievements in less than nine months in office. Mr. Obama’s willingness to respect and work with other nations is another.” Who better for the Euro-kooks to honor and the
Times
to celebrate than an American kook who was moving American decline along so nicely? They gave him the prize based on his own campaign slogan of “hope,” but “hope” is neither a strategy nor an achievement. But, hey, the award has been given to Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Yasser Arafat over the years, so who are we to judge?

The whole episode was so bizarre that even some of Obama’s most devout supporters were left wondering, “What the @$%&! just happened?” If Obama had had any respect for the prize or sense of personal decency, he would have either declined to accept it until he had accomplished something substantive
or
he would have accepted it on behalf of the United States military. Instead, he accepted it for himself and couldn’t suppress a Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars faux humility: “I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.” Other recipients had done things like founding the Red Cross, implementing the Marshall Plan after World War II, and signing the Camp David accords. But Barry’s big accomplishment for world peace in 2009 was simply drawing breath.

Actually, the Nobel Committee should have taken a page from the playbook of Arizona State University, which in April 2009 decided
against
awarding Obama an honorary degree when he spoke at commencement that year. ASU spokeswoman Sharon Keeler said, “It’s normally awarded to someone who has been in their field for some time. Considering that the president is at the beginning of his presidency, his body of work is just beginning.” The folks at ASU should’ve received the Nobel Prize for Common Sense.

A year and a half later, after Obama had ordered the military surge in Afghanistan and had begun combat operations in Libya, leftist gadfly Michael Moore tweeted, “May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize?”

Politico asked some members of the Nobel Committee if they had any regrets awarding the Peace Prize to such a Bushian warmonger. Thorbjørn Jagland, the committee’s chairman, replied, “He got the prize for what he did. Not for what he did afterwards.” And Geir Lundestad, the committee’s secretary, replied: “The Nobel Peace Prize is no declaration of sainthood. And no American president will ever be a saint.” Nice.

What the Nobel Committee liked about Barack Obama was the
idea
of Barack Obama, a young, biracial multilateralist who wasn’t going to be merely the president of that horrible United States but more like a president of the world. They believed he’d make their sacred “one world” vision a reality. He’d be, in former ambassador John Bolton’s phrase, the first “post-American” president. So he got a Nobel Prize for filling the fantasy of European leftists that he’d lead them to their promised land of global redistributionism and one-world government. They hope for it still. And after their decision, there was no stopping the Obama Cult of Personality once the Man Behind the Curtain had a Nobel Peace Prize swinging from his neck.

On May 26, 2009, Obama created a shadowy, four-person national security team known as the Global Engagement Directorate (GED), which sounded like it came straight from goofy spymaster Basil Exposition in
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
. In an official White House announcement, Obama bestowed the new GED with a vague mission “to drive comprehensive engagement policies that leverage diplomacy, communications, international development and assistance, and domestic engagement and outreach in pursuit of a host of national security objectives.” (Imagine if President Bush had created such a sinister-sounding secretive group, reporting only to the president, with such ambiguous goals. Chris Matthews would’ve experienced male menopause on national television.)

The directorate set out immediately to whitewash the terminology of Islamic terror and radicalism. Under President Bush, the National Security Strategy stated: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.” An accurate and true statement, but far too politically incorrect for Team Obama. The GED moved to sanitize the vocabulary surrounding the global war on Islamic terror, expanding the effort to soften the rhetoric first begun in the latter years of Bush’s presidency. The virus of political correctness infected the way in which Obama and his fellow kooks spoke about the enemy and in how they dealt with it.

Islam? Islam? Bueller? Anyone?

On May 4, 2010, investigators made an arrest in an attempted car bombing in New York City. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani native–turned–naturalized U.S. citizen, was taken into custody. He was naturalized in 2009 (when Team Obama was busy scratching “Islamic terror” from the lexicon), and shortly thereafter he made a trip to Peshawar, Pakistan, a hotbed of Islamic terrorist activity and recruitment.

In the countless early stories about his arrest, not one mentioned his faith. We were left to deduce that he was a Muslim by his Pakistani ethnicity and name, although I’m sure plenty of leftists assumed someone named Faisal Shahzad could very easily be an Irish Catholic priest from Boston, a Scandinavian dairy farmer from Wisconsin, or a Pennsylvania Dutch Amish Mennonite.

This suicidal inability to call the enemy what it is comes straight from the top. Obama doubled down on Bush’s late-stage wimpiness and will not go anywhere near placing the words “Islam” and “terror” together. His administration has contorted itself into all kinds of politically correct gymnastics to avoid making the connection, going so far as to term acts of terror “man-made disasters,” the fight against terrorism “combating violent extremism,” missions fought abroad “overseas contingency operations,” and the wars themselves “kinetic military actions.” When an Islamist tries to cut someone’s head off, Obama calls it a “close shave.”

These euphemisms for Islamic terror are dangerously counterproductive. Obama refused to speak the truth about the motivation of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who referred to himself as a “soldier of Allah” and became obviously radicalized before shooting to death thirteen fellow Americans and wounding many more in the name of Islam. Nor would Obama make the Islam and terror connection with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim who tried to detonate a bomb aboard a Northwest flight and rain hundreds of bodies over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Obama refused to “jump to conclusions” about what propelled them to try to kill Americans … although he had no problem “jumping to conclusions” about Sergeant James Crowley of the Cambridge Police, who he declared “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates without knowing the full story.

In terms of pure idiocy about the Islamic threat, however, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s comment before Shahzad’s arrest took the cake: “If I had to guess … this would be exactly that. Homegrown. Maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something.” Bloomberg was kept apprised of the investigation in real time but would not acknowledge the truth. When Shahzad’s identity was made public and it was clear that he was not a deranged Tea Partier, CNN then helpfully theorized that he might have acted out of frustration after having suffered the indignity of home foreclosure. CBS and the Associated Press seemed equally mystified by what may have driven Shahzad to want to blow up Times Square: “Faisal Shahzad’s Motive Shrouded in Mystery,” blared their headline. Of course, Shahzad’s real motivation—Islamic jihad—appeared nowhere in their article. Tea Partiers were smeared as violent, crazed maniacs, but
actual
violent, crazed maniacs were getting a free pass.

Unless and until we can call this enemy and what drives them to kill what they are, we cannot and will not win this Kinetic Military Action. And yet, our leaders still choose to sugarcoat the true nature of the threat. Before Major Hasan gunned down scores of people at Fort Hood, he told anyone who would listen that as an Islamist, he hated America and was preparing to carry out an act of war against the United States. He had up to twenty e-mail communications with American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, which drew the attention of the FBI and the Army, which later dropped the case after concluding that Hasan didn’t pose a threat. Before the slaughter, he gave away his possessions, including a Koran. As he bore down on his victims, he screamed, “Allah Akbar!” Later, the administration would preposterously classify his act of jihad as “workplace violence.” So, according to the Barry White House, a Muslim subversive committing the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11 is nothing more than a parallel to the scene in the movie
Office Space
where Peter, Michael, and Samir destroy the evil computer printer that has been tormenting them at work.

When Hasan’s commander in chief first appeared hours after the killings, he stunned everybody by spending the first three minutes chuckling and tossing shout-outs to his buddies in the audience. His breathtaking insensitivity at a time of national grief echoed his breathtaking insensitivity eight days after 9/11, when he argued for compassion for our enemies while only coldly acknowledging the victims.

In a particularly hilarious example of political correctness, House Democrats asked Third Way, a left-of-center think tank, and then–California representative Jane Harman to run a “terrorism-talking school” for their congressional candidates. The sessions included how to “avoid the trap of looking soft and weak” and which “strong adverbs” to use. Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) said that he learned to say “I’m going to fight for American interests abroad” rather than “I’m going to defend American values” because the former sounded “more assertive.” I’m sure they were instructed never to use the words “Islam” and “terror” together because that’s far
too
assertive.

The handling of the war by Obama and the kooks became less about protecting America from its enemies than about carrying out a public relations campaign. Obama’s administration attempted to fight the war on Islamic terror according to the
Politically Correct Guide Dealing with Misguided But Fundamentally Good People Who Just Need to Be Better Understood
. After all, as he indicated in his September 19, 2001, article, our enemies are people too.

Obama couldn’t wait to become president and become the White Swan to President Bush’s Black Swan. All of the Bush counterterrorism policies against which Obama had long railed would be banished in a hail of executive orders: the terrorist facility at Guantánamo Bay would be closed along with third-country “black” sites to which terrorist suspects had been rendered for interrogation; enhanced interrogation techniques would be terminated; indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, and data mining would end; and military tribunals would be replaced by civilian criminal trials for even the most hardened terrorists. All of the “unconstitutional” Bush policies would come to a screeching halt under Obama, so the rest of the world could see that we had returned to good-guy status.

On the first full day of his presidency, Obama delivered this soft touch to the hardest of hard-core terrorists. He issued an executive order demanding the immediate closure of the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, which he and his fellow kooks had argued was a blight on the rule of law and a terrorist recruitment bonanza. Never mind that the al-Qaeda jihadists hit on September 11, before Guantánamo even existed. Never mind that the terrorist suspects being held there are foreign enemy combatants who are not entitled to the full panoply of U.S. legal rights and privileges and that the Supreme Court had held that they could be held “indefinitely” until the end of the war. Never mind that they already had legal representation and due process through the right to federal court review. Never mind that they had three full meals a day, religious services, and state-of-the-art medical services, all under the watchful eye of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Under Obama, military tribunals, which had been in use since Revolutionary War times and held constitutional by the Supreme Court, were to be ended, with some military trials—such as that of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—stopped after they had already begun. Terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo would be matriculated into civilian criminal courts on U.S. soil. And with the facility closing due to Obama’s executive order, there would be no choice.

Obama and the kooks decided to treat acts of war against the United States as if they were stickups at the 7-Eleven. They catapulted us back to the September 10, 2001, mind-set in which we treated international terror as a criminal justice problem, to be handled in civilian courts. The United States would prosecute even the highest-level al-Qaeda terrorists like we would Al Capone, Charles Manson, or Lindsay Lohan. We would make sure they received very public due process to show that we had reclaimed the “moral high ground” in this fight against man-made disasters.