I'm not much of a fan of Juan Williams, needless to say. But in his column in the Hill today, the man reveals another reason behind Operation "I Don't Have A Strategy" that is every bit as tell-tale as it sounds:
Fox News analyst Juan Williams has warned the GOP that there’s going to be some political bombshells going off in the weeks leading up to Election Day caused by “the ISIS effect.”
In an opinion column for the Hill, Williams says that the Democrats are gaining steam ahead of the November elections as voters appear to be rallying around President Barack Obama due to his recent handling of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror threat.
A Fox News poll last week showed that terrorism is now just as much a key issue to voters as the economy when it comes to how people will vote, with 41% of Americans saying they are both “extremely important” to their decisions, Williams wrote.
While noting that pollster Dana Blanton called it “the ISIS effect,” the analyst said that Obama’s approval numbers have been climbing since he announced plans to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS with U.S. air power.
Previously, the beheadings of two American journalists and Obama’s admission that he lacked a strategy to deal with the jihadist terror group had hurt his ratings. But Williams, who’s said to be a registered Democrat, pointed out that the polls have been “shifting in the president’s favor.”
Williams wrote that a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported 62% of voters supported Obama’s "strategy" to take action against ISIS with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
Pew polling last week even found support for the president’s plan is coming from both sides of the political aisle, said the political analyst, noting that a Rasmussen poll similarly found 66% of likely U.S. voters support Obama’s plans to deal with the Sunni fanatics.
Although many Republicans have attacked Obama for not putting boots on the ground in the Middle East conflict, polls show that many Americans back the president’s decision not to send combat troops back to the region to fight the Islamic extremists, according to Williams. [emphasis added]
A more illustrative term for this would be "propaganda jiu jitsu". The White House calculated that all they had to do to turn around the embarrassment fallout from O publicly admitting that he had no strategy for dealing with the Islamic State was to create the façade of a "plan" for doing so that would make it look like the Regime was "doing something" about ISIS without actually doing anything to defeat them, stop them, or even slow them down. That the same dynamic that did so much to put Barack Obama into power in the first place - a public indoctrination, brainwashing, of "war weariness" - was still present in the American collective consciousness and could be easily rekindled to dupe them into the suicidal belief that an existential threat to American interests and home and abroad like ISIS can be beaten on the cheap, "pain"-free, with no cost or sacrifices. And it appears that the White House was right, providing them, as a bonus, with a "wag the dog" dynamic that may well both save the Democrat Senate majority and win them back the House of Representatives as well. Which helps explain why Republicans overwhelmingly voted for O's "plan" to arm and train ISIS's new Syrian "rebel" allies despite fully knowing better.
I'm still waiting to see any convincing evidence of Barack Obama's legendary "incompetence," folks. Six years and counting, and I've yet to see hide nor hare of it.
The above creates a very telling contrast with this story:
American airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) have done little to rollback the militant group's territorial gains in part because many Sunni tribes have chosen not to engage, the New York Times reported.
The United States air offensive has been successful in halting advances of the terrorist group but ISIS continues to hammer Iraqi government forces, with hundreds of soldiers having been killed in battle or mass executions.
"Behind the government's struggles on the battlefield is the absence or resistance of many of the Sunni Muslim tribes that all sides say will play the decisive role in the course of the fight — presenting a slow start for the centerpiece of President Obama's plan to drive out the militants," the Times said.
Translation: Air power alone cannot defeat the Islamic State - short of several well-placed neutron warheads, anyway - and few, if any, of O's vaunted proxy soldiers in Iraq are any more eager or willing to fight for the same America that abandoned them to ISIS in the first place than is the "Free Syrian Army" that, if it ever existed, was jilted and ridiculed by The One into making its own separate peace with ISIS.
But for Barack Obama's purposes, none of that matters. His goal isn't to do anything to the Islamic State, but to [BLEEP] John Boehner and Mitch McConnell right up the ass, and turn Congress back over to Nancy Pelosi and Harry (G)Reid so that he will have even more time for fundraising, vacations, golf, galaga, and shrimp, like in the good ol' days of 2009 and 2010.
Looks like one more "mission accomplished" banner is headed for the Oval Office rafters. At least for a while....
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