Good Saturday morning, students.
Professor Newt Gingrich is going to lecture you on the link attached here about how little President Obama understands about the international terror threat being posed to the United States and, of course, he implies that he — the professor — gets it.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/22/opinion/gingrich-isis-obama/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
I don’t deny that the professor is smart. He knows how to win elections, he knows how to rouse them rabbles. He’s just not that good at governing, as his stint as speaker of the House of Reps demonstrated back in the late 1990s.
Here’s in part what he writes about the president’s remarks on the beheading of American journalist James Foley by ISIS terrorists: “I urge you to read President Obama’s full text. It isn’t very long. The most delusional line is his assertion that ‘people like this ultimately fail. They fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy.’ Of course it is freedom and the rule of law that have been rare throughout history, and tyranny and lawlessness that have been common. ISIS and the ideology it represents won’t just wear themselves out.
“One has to wonder whether the President understands how serious a threat ISIS presents. ISIS is a fact. It is a religiously motivated movement that uses terror as one of its weapons. Beheading people is nothing new in history.”
One has to wonder? No, one need not wonder whether Barack Obama “understands how serious a threat” ISIS is to the rest of the world. He’s living with it. He is hearing constantly from his national security team, his diplomatic team, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and from critics such as Professor Gingrich — precisely how dangerous this group of monsters is to the United States.
Gingrich has posed some fascinating notions about ISIS’s reach into mainstream cultures, such as Great Britain. He’s correct to suggest we’d better take this organization seriously.
However, he ought to stop there. Let’s not presume that the president of the United States doesn’t understand these things. The nation has one commander in chief at a time.
At the moment, it is not Professor Newt Gingrich.