Friday, June 17, 2016

America Deserves Better: Neither Trump nor Clinton are Rising to the Islamic State Threat

Even amid a terrorist massacre on the scale of Orlando, the American people are getting more reasons to justify their unhappiness with the political class. By which we mean the day-after responses of President Obama and the two presumptive nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The American people deserve a better strategy to defeat terrorism than they are getting.
Mr. Obama appears to be doubling down on the evasions of the last eight years, as he tries to prove to the last day that he isn’t George W. Bush. The killer of 49 people, Mr. Obama said Monday, “appears” to have declared his loyalty to Islamic State “at the last minute.” Meaning exactly what? Presumably on the Obama anti-terrorism scale of 1 to 10, we’re still not at 10 on his watch because the terrorist slaughters in Orlando and San Bernardino were “homegrown.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks, on various TV shows and in a speech in New Hampshire Monday, gave little evidence he has talked to anyone in the intelligence or foreign-policy communities about the substantive details of addressing the threat. He suggested on TV that some of the Orlando club-goers should have had guns “strapped to their ankles.” Mr. Trump devoted about 80% of his New Hampshire speech to restating and defending his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, with the proviso that it would be “temporary,” once we can “perfectly screen these people.”
SPECIFIC? Specifics are hard ...
But Mr. Trump’s thoughts on what exactly he would do to stop Islamic terrorism at its source in the Middle East weren’t much more than a footnote. On the one hand, he rightly said the goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism by uniting the civilized world in the fight. But doing what?
Read the rest of this WSJ editorial HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.


No comments: