Obama is ignoring real threat to nation

By Jonathan Gurwitz
San Antonio Express-News
Published: Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009 12:02 a.m. MDT


A joint session of Congress is a rare forum, even for a president of the United States, one that certainly commands more dignity than boorish heckling.

A president who uses that distinguished venue during the second week of September — days before the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — can be expected to talk to the nation in somber tones about security, threats and enemies.

This, President Barack Obama did Wednesday night. But not in the way many Americans would have expected.

August was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in eight years of warfare. Across the border, Pakistan remains a tinderbox of Islamic radicalism, a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and a haven for nuclear-weapons proliferator A.Q. Khan. In a television interview last week, Khan boasted of the critical assistance he and other senior Pakistani officials provided to Iran's nuclear-weapons program.

New U.S. intelligence reports conclude that Iran now has enough nuclear fuel to quickly produce a weapon. As the mullahs spin their centrifuges, they've strengthened their alliance with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, while their terrorist proxies — Hezbollah — have rearmed in Lebanon and are expanding their tentacles in Latin America.

Yet Obama went to the Capitol Wednesday evening to deliver a frightful speech about ... health security, the Republican threat to health-insurance reform and the enemies of progress — town-hall protesters and insurance companies.

This is not to suggest that there aren't real problems with health insurance and the health-care-delivery system. There are.

But a president has to be particularly tone deaf to use a joint session of Congress two days before the 9/11 anniversary to go on the offensive against American citizens who are critical of his policies and not even mention the terrorists and their state sponsors who continue to be on the offensive against American military personnel, civilians and interests around the world.

How tone deaf? Organizing for America, Obama's official campaign organization, issued an appeal urging supporters to act like "a true patriot" on Patriot Day, Sept. 11, by calling their U.S. senators and urging them to "defeat anti-democratic forces of hate ... while the public languishes under the burden of our present health-care system."

The call to arms, which has since been removed from the BarackObama.com Web site but is still viewable with Google cache, exhorted followers to "reclaim our land from the heirs of, yes: bin Laden." "All 50 states are coordinating in this — as we fight back against our own right-wing domestic terrorists who are subverting the American democratic process."

How could something like this have made it onto the president's campaign Web site? The same way the White House Web site called on citizens to report "fishy" criticism of health-care reform. The same way the White House vetted Van Jones, self-declared Marxist revolutionary and proponent of 9/11 conspiracy theories, to be a green jobs "czar." The same way Obama squandered a joint session of Congress to rehash a partisan agenda that a majority of Americans oppose.

The genius of the Obama campaign was its ability to connect with the feelings and concerns of so many Americans from so many different backgrounds. That genius has given way to a vile political machine that is more interested in branding critics as domestic terrorists than acknowledging the tragic losses inflicted by foreign terrorists on 9/11 — and the real threat they continue to pose to the nation.