Mark Steyn takes us to a place where President Obama personally and a lot of Americans just don’t want to go:

Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo’s closure and his investigation of Bush officials, to his bow before the Saudi king and a speech in Cairo to “the Muslim world” with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we’re still gonna kill you.

According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world’s superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can’t blame the world’s mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.

For two weeks, the government of the United States has made itself a global laughingstock. Don’t worry, “the system worked,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano. Don’t worry, he was an “isolated extremist,” said the president. Don’t worry, we’re banning bathroom breaks for the last hour of the flight, said the TSA. Don’t worry, “U.S. border security officials” told the Los Angeles Times, we knew he was on the plane, and we “had decided to question him when he landed.” Don’t worry, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, assured the Sunday talk shows, sure, we read him his rights, and he’s lawyered up but he’ll soon see that “there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements.”

Oh, that’s grand. Try to kill hundreds of people in an act of war, and it’s the starting point for a plea deal. In his Cairo speech, the president bragged that the United States would “punish” those in America who would “deny” the “right of women and girls to wear the hijab.” If he’s so keen on it, maybe he should consider putting the entire federal government into full-body burkas and zipping up the eye slit so that, henceforth, every public utterance by John Brennan will be entirely inaudible. Americans should be ashamed by this all-fools’ fortnight.

On Thursday, having renounced over the preceding days “the system worked,” the “isolated extremist,” the more obviously risible TSA responses, the Gitmo-Yemen express checkout and various other follies, the president finally spoke the words: “We are at war.” As National Review’s Rich Lowry noted, they were more or less dragged from the presidential gullet by Dick Cheney, who’d accused the commander in chief of failing to grasp this basic point. Again, to be fair, it isn’t just Obama. Last November, the electorate voted, in effect, to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore

From time to time a certain reality seeps through in the media. But most of the time people seem to just ignore the fact that a war has been very explicitly declared on the West and the values of the Enlightenment. Many Americans still wish the whole thing would just go away since fighting it entails doing away with much of two generations of creeping political correctness. For a brief moment the Obama administration talked the talk, but many in the West seem to want to play roulette and hope that we’re able to skirt some really bad thing by biding our time and just hoping that somehow things get better. That doesn’t sound like much of a strategy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.