Nice Isn't the End of Evil

I generally refrain from writing a post after a terrorist attack. Political posts generally try to cash in on the suffering of others to make policy gains. And non-political posts, while they don't do any harm, let's face it, other than letting your followers know what a good person you are, they don't really help anyone.

The pattern is now the story
But last night's attack in Nice was different. First of all, the tone of the media coverage has shifted. For example, in most of the stories I read, there was a timeline of other recent terrorist attacks, with a count of the wounded and slain. In other words, the pattern of jihadist violence has finally become a key part of the story. Not even the mainstream media is now willing to deny that all these myriad events are connected.

The weapon is one we have to trust
Secondly, the attack wasn't made with a gun, or bomb, or even a knife, that could then be blamed for the evil committed. It was done with a truck. Trucks bring food to our supermarkets, gas to our gas stations, and just about everything else to where we need it. In spite of a little more pollution than we would like, we can all agree that trucks are Good Things. So good, in fact, that we can't do without them. In other words, no one can deny we have to trust trucks, to a degree far beyond our dependence on guns (which are obviously necessary for law enforcement, whether or not you agree with individual gun rights).

There will be a next time and we know that now
So, as a society, we've come to the point where we are finally admitting, in a tacit way, that these attacks are not isolated. We're facing the even more painful fact that nothing we've yet tried will really work to defend us from something like what happened in Nice last night. And we're all realizing what eight long years of domestic peace under George W. Bush caused us to forget: these attacks won't stop on their own. They keep coming and there's no end in sight.

My problems with post-attack calls for gun legislation
Twelve to twenty-four hours after a shooting attack is when you would normally hear calls for new gun legislation. I have three main problems with such calls: First, gun laws will almost always take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and do nothing to prevent criminals from getting them. This makes the problem worse, not better. Second, there is never much chance of the initiatives being discussed to see the light of day, much less be enacted into law. They are floated out of a purely political desire to excite the anti-gun base.

The gun laws aren't even designed to work
Finally, and here is the real problem, gun laws put forward after major shooting events wouldn't have prevented those shootings if they had previously been law. Those laws are just proposed to advance an anti-gun agenda in general, and after a shooting event is the best time to try them out. They wouldn't fix the problem. It is political opportunism at its most parasitic.

Now we face a difficult question
We have a clearer road forward after this attack in one respect at least: no one is going to seriously call for a truck ban (though I expect some may do so in jest). So now Left and Right should be in agreement that the weapon wasn't the problem. We can't blame the weapon, and we have a rising belief that the incidents aren't isolated. This is real progress. We may not yet have the answers we need, but we are finally going to be asking the right question. And that is: How in the heck do we keep this from ever happening again?

Border security and immigration
It's a sign of the effectiveness of Trump's message that his name has become synonymous with tighter border security. However, the concept (obviously) predates him. As I have said many times, I am no Trump fan, and while I support tighter border enforcement, I don't even support all of his ideas on that subject. On one point, however, I think Trump fans and Trump detractors, and even many on the Left, would agree: the border is our first line of defense in stopping would-be terrorists from reaching their soft targets (shopping malls, parks, power stations, etc). Tightening security there would be a step in the right direction, even if we don't build the wall Trump wants, or leave the borders porous and have a de facto amnesty for illegals as is our current policy. But even more important is the scrutiny given those who enter the country legally.

Certain aspects of Islam are not merely religious beliefs
One of Trump's terrible ideas is to deny U.S. entry to all Muslims. But did you know that a sizeable percentage (some polls put it as high as half) of American Muslims would support the installation of Sharia Law as a replacement to the Constitution? This preference for Sharia is not just a religious belief, but is obviously political as well. I don't think it's unreasonable or bigoted at all to deny visas to those who hold such beliefs, let alone to those who would support the use of violence to advance that goal (those we call Islamists).

Bush Doctrine?
Long term, we might have to be prepared to fight again. Heaven forbid, but we may have to save blood at home by spilling it abroad. The war in Iraq might have turned George W. Bush's name into a dirty word, but let's face it, if you have an enemy whose soldiers you can't identify once they leave home, but you know where they are being indoctrinated, recruited, and trained, isn't it a good idea to go fight them there? No, we don't at present have any intelligence connecting Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (the truck driver in Nice) to ISIS. Not so with earlier attacks in Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere.

All the facts aren't in
It's important to say that at the time of this writing, it is not yet generally known what motivated Bouhlel to such an unspeakable act. His neighbors claim he was depressed and going through a divorce. His wife's cousin says he took drugs and never went to mosque. So, obviously, it is an assumption at this point to call what he did an act of jihadi violence. It would be very surprising to me, however, if Bouhlel's willingness to kill dozens of innocent people, including women and children, was unconnected to a radical Islamist world view. The place and time of his chosen attack seem to support this assumption. Certainly ISIS itself has taken his motivations as a given and are celebrating his evil actions.

Appeasement is worse than doing nothing
It's time to stop apologizing to Islamists (those who support the violent installation of Sharia law) for the foreign policy of previous administrations, time to stop negotiating with state sponsors of terror like Iran, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, time to stop giving those who would install Sharia in the West a pass as merely having a difference of opinion.

Western Civilization is a threat to Islamism
This is an existential struggle. It begins when we, Western Civilization, all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, and others, deny the lie of multiculturalism and finally admit, that, yes, we've got a pretty good thing going here. Western Civilization, and its three main pillars, capitalism, representative democracy, and religious freedom, are better than their alternatives around the world, especially the many countries now under Sharia law. We must learn and advocate the ideas that made our society (and our country) great. Otherwise, we can't battle the ideas that radicalize too many vulnerable people, especially young Muslims, and turn them into terrorists. We can no longer afford to believe all philosophies are created equal. Certainly Islamists are not making that mistake.

The Big Deal About Benghazi

There seem to be two common reactions to the September 11, 2012 attack on our Libyan consulate in Benghazi: outrage and yawns. If you’re one of the yawners, wondering why this story keeps getting brought up after several weeks have gone by, you’re not alone. It isn't strange not to know what there is to be upset about. Actually, it might not even be your fault.

The first problem in all this is the confusion over the President’s main job. I’ll give you a hint: the President’s main job isn’t redistributing wealth, taking care of the poor, bringing energy independence, stopping global warming, or even saving car companies, improving health care, or stimulating the economy. It isn’t sponsoring legislation, reaching across the aisle, creating jobs, or fixing education. Presidents try to do many of these things, and you may or may not think they’re good ideas. But all of it is beside the point if he doesn’t do the thing that should be first and foremost on every President’s agenda every day: keep Americans safe. That one tops the list and always will.

That’s why the story won’t die: the President failed in his number one job, and the failure was not just incidental, it was a spectacular failure with disastrous consequences. Then, almost immediately, he lied about it, and when confronted on his lies, told different lies. Let’s examine each of these claims.

First: that the President failed. It’s entirely self-evident (or was before the media began covering Obama’s tracks by shifting the blame for Benghazi) that protecting our diplomats is essential to any kind of credibility in our foreign policy. So why didn't they act when the attack began? We now know that the State Department received repeated requests for armed assistance from the consulate--in fact, we have learned that there was a live internet feed directly to the White House during the attack. Though Benghazi is not extremely close to a military base, we had air power that could have been above Benghazi in twenty minutes, and men that could have touched ground from Italy within two hours. Instead, the ambassador’s security requests were denied, and he was killed. (This is not even considering the requests leading up to the 11th, only those sent during the actual attack.) The administration abandoned the ambassador and left him to die. Two retired Navy Seals nearby had to disobey direct orders to attempt a rescue, and they paid the ultimate price. There were other retired Seals with them, who we can presume would have helped, if only they had been allowed to.

Now, the people around the President would have brought him this situation and asked him what to do. One of two things is true about the decision to cut off Ambassador Stevens. Either the President made the decision, or he didn’t. We deserve to know which it is and why. If it wasn’t the President, it means there is a critical breakdown of trust and responsibility within his chain of command, the kind that should have already resulted in careers cut short if not courts martial, and the ultimate responsibility would still rest squarely with the Commander-in-Chief. If he did order the inaction, it’s even worse. We can only guess at what the reasons for that might be. I personally suspect that Obama took a lot of pride in the way he handled the Libyan coup without committing troops to the conflict, and also in the idea that Al Qaeda (and hence, Islamic terrorism in general) was "on the run." He didn’t want to spoil that narrative so close to election day. If I'm right, this is truly a craven and disgusting motivation. I obviously don't know what's in the President's head, but it's definitely true that if the President were proud of his motives, he would have disclosed them to us. He hasn’t.

Whatever his reasons, the decision turned out to be the wrong one, and the consulate fell. The Administration next moved into full-on CYA mode, desperate to spin the American deaths in any way they could. Circumstances seemed to help out the President--there was a demonstration in Egypt that coincided with the Benghazi attack. If he could just conflate the two angry mobs in the minds of Americans, people might never know of his colossal blunder. So, he put out the story that the mob in Benghazi was just like the one in Egypt--chaotic, spontaneous, and angry about an anti-Islam film. The problem is, he knew that wasn’t the case, and we have proof that he knew: shortly before the attack in Libya, the ambassador accompanied a visiting dignitary to the gate, and reported no mob action. There was no angry demonstration slowly gaining momentum. Every intelligence report that is released only serves to confirm it was a sudden attack, by a small group of well-armed individuals, planned to coincide with September 11th for symbolic reasons. The White House, the CIA, and the State Department all knew from day one. The President himself, along with others in his administration lied about it, also from day one.

Then, in the second debate against his Republican opponent, President Obama changed his tune. Now he fully admitted that it was a deliberate attack, but acted like his reaction to that attack had been totally appropriate. Then he lied about the first story he had told, saying he had always maintained it was a planned attack. The problem with that is, there’s no need to even research the question to know that he was lying--if you watched the news after September 11th, you saw him lie. He lied, during the debate, about his earlier lie, something that was right out there in the public record.

To me, this is an admission on the part of the President that he is not only incapable, but unwilling to do his number one job. He’s too busy with jobs 414 through 92,748 to care about keeping Americans safe. If I hadn’t already made up my mind on how to cast my vote, there is no question that this issue would have decided it for me.

Which brings us to why it’s not your fault. You don't know what a big deal this was, because the media is happy to endorse the President's lie. This information is so damaging to the President that, if the whole story were told in the way it should be, it would make it impossible for him to retain his office! What’s a Democratic journalist to do?

The thing they haven’t done is demand answers, or even give the story decent coverage. If President Bush, (or a hypothetical President McCain or Romney) had made this mistake, it would have front page coverage until he resigned. At the very least it would be the end of his political power. But with this President, they’d rather talk about the fact that Romney “politicized” the riots with a premature statement.

Think about that. The media, rather than being justifiably outraged at the utter mismanagement (you might even say creation) of a crisis in the Middle East, is criticizing Romney for...what? Drawing the public’s attention to it? Making a swift and decisive statement in a time of uncertainty? Pointing out Obama’s flaws?

The kind of treatment Obama gets from the press, in turn, changes the way he governs. If he's not held accountable for his mistakes, why should he worry about making more?

Last time, Obama was elected on a campaign of change. During this campaign, Mitt Romney has shown repeatedly what his kind of “change” looks like: under President Obama, we’re paying more for much of what we buy every day, we’re less able to get health care, we’re making less money, and we’re less sure of our government’s financial outlook. But it was Barack Obama himself that showed us the worst change of all. We’re less safe.

Do you really need to hear more?