Remember the Orlando nightclub shooting last year, as Barack Obama was finishing up his contemptible presidency? Recall the national nightmare of the Islamist acts of terror, unabated and uncriticized by the slavish, leftist press that had put Barack Obama into office by declining to vet his undistinguished non-record in 2008?
After the horrific shooting up of that gay nightclub in Orlando last year, The Man Whose Legacy Is More Important To Him Than Our Security made the speech he thought he had to make. And, as if on cue, it included what we knew it would, and excluded what we knew he couldn't say. Let us recall ...
"Say a prayer for [the victims] and say a prayer for their families -- that God give them the strength to bear the unbearable. And that He give us all the strength to be there for them, and the strength and courage to change."
Say what?
I certainly said a prayer for the victims and their families. But I'll be darned if I think I need to ask the good Lord for the "strength and courage" to change, because for the life of me I can't make a shred of connection between the ISIS guy who carried out the attacks, called the police in the middle of the incident to pledge allegiance to ISIS, and then died ignominiously after shooting over 100 innocents, and me.
I didn't commit this attack. I don't live in Florida. I don't hate people, certainly not LGBT people who are perfectly entitled to go to a club at two in the morning and leave safely. I'm decidedly not an ISIS sympathizer. The murderer never heard of me nor, before yesterday, did I ever hear of him. I rather think that if you are reading this, you can say every one of those sentences in this paragraph factually.
So what in the heck was Barack Obama talking about -- why did I need to pray for the "strength and courage to change"?
Well, I'll tell you. While running for the presidency, Hillary Clinton loved talking about "code", as in people (in this case, Donald Trump) saying something when they mean something far more sinister, so that "we" will understand the message, you know. Barack Obama did exactly the same thing, frequently, but I'm guessing that Hillary, who desperately needed Obama's intervention to keep her out of prison, wasn't going to say anything about his coded message.
So I guess you have to depend on me to translate Obamaspeak. Here goes -- "give us the strength and courage to change" is code for "It's all our fault, not ISIS's fault, not the guy's fault who attacked the nightclub. It's our fault for hating people who are different from us (only applicable to straight white males, by the way, and definitely not to radicalized gay Muslims)".
It was not, in Obamaspeak, his own fault for facilitating ISIS by vacating our military victory in Iraq, and for handcuffing the FBI to limit the amount of time it can investigate a likely terrorist without bringing charges. Nope, wasn't him. It was us. And we are the ones who have to apologize and pray for the strength and courage to "change."
OK, I'm going to change, all right, and I did. I added a little more vitriol to my columns when Obama's name was part of the topic. I'm going to continue to point out those complicit in his rise to power, from the corrupt press, to the leftist powers in Washington who helped him step on the USA, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and be a tad more vitriolic when I do. Because God only knows there's no better way to remember the 50-odd dead and 50-odd more wounded than to remind everyone whose inaction on ISIS, whose refusal to name them, led to the attack.
It can only be intentional, of course. Listen to this further clip from Obama's speech, where he is discussing the FBI investigation and who he has "directed" to do this or that: "We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer." I ask again -- say what?
Let's see. The murderer has a history of scaring people at his workplace by claiming ties to terrorist groups, including causing at least one employee to go find work elsewhere. In the middle of his murders, he paused to call 911 and pledge allegiance to ISIS. He frequented this very club where the murders took place. ISIS declared him to be a foot-soldier of the "caliphate" in the USA. The "ISIS Radio" (how have we not bombed that into oblivion?) claimed three days earlier that it was going to conduct an attack in Florida.
Barack Obama knew, as much as you and I and the moss growing on trees in Idaho knew, that this was an ISIS-connected act of radical Islamic terrorism. The FBI knew it. They knew it so well that barely two hours after the attack ended, the FBI special agent in charge stood before microphones and answered a question of the press by effectively saying that it was.
But Obama? Nope, it had to be intentional on Obama's part, else he would not have the brass nether-parts to stand in front of the USA and not even utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism" when everyone knew that was the "precise motivation" of the murderer. Now, what that intent was may be a mystery, especially given his possible gayness, but it is quite plain what his "imprecise motivation" was.
I wonder if we ever will know, actually, why the now-former president of the United States would sell out his countrymen as badly as Obama did. I wonder if we will ever know his true motivation to defend radical Islam, to the point of turning every incident of ISIS violence into something Americans are supposed to blame ourselves for.
But I will indeed "pray for strength and courage." I will pray for America, that we develop the strength and courage to learn from the disaster of the Obama presidency and never again elect an apologist for murderers, to public office, anywhere. That we never again allow the left to capitulate to such a person. That our nation's press finally develops the integrity to decide that "first black president" -- or "first female president" -- is a far less valid rationale for a vote than "strong, competent, intelligent and patriotic president who understands the role of the military, understands what a budget is, and when he or she puts two and two together, actually gets four."
And I will pray for myself. That I can continue to find the words to persuade America to find that strength every November.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton