Vice-President ISIS

From Noah at Down With Tyranny:

 

Or really just his interpretation of religious law.  His interpretation of religious law from the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament.

President Obama Defeats ISIS; Orange Loser Takes Credit

Yes, of course we know he's lying.  The problem is that we're not his audience.  His mouth-breathing voters are.  And all they hear is what he says and how his Faux News cheerleaders repeat it.

This is how bad history gets written in stone.

Kevin Drum:

ISIS is hardly Barack Obama’s finest moment. He was late to understand what was happening and slow to do anything about it. But in the end he did do something about it, and he did the right thing: he kept the US footprint light; he avoided rules of engagement that would inflame the very people we were trying to liberate; and he understood that the only route to victory lay in a slow but steady campaign. It wasn’t sexy, but it worked.

In a few weeks or months, Donald Trump will announce that we’ve won the war against ISIS. Will he give Obama any recognition for this? Of course not. So that means the rest of us will have to do it for him.

Next Day:

Trump did nothing. The plan to take both Mosul and Raqqa was initiated under Obama, and Trump famously refused to approve a new plan for months because the military kept telling him that Obama’s approach was working. So he put them off and put them off until he finally approved a plan in August that was mostly the same as the plan we already had. And now he’s claiming that this new plan turned things around in eight weeks.

I know we don’t expect anything else from Trump. But he can always be even worse than you think, can’t he? Hell, he didn’t even give the military any credit, let alone Obama. What a jackass.

How to Fight ISIS

Via Juanita Jean:

Why Are We Declaring War on a Bunch of Punks?

Because the repugs can't get it up unless we're massacring brown folks. And they can't win elections unless they've got everybody terrified of a boogeyman under the bed.

Digby:

Maybe some of these right wing panic artists will listen to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. (I doubt it, but it's worth a try.)

The truth is that ISIS and its affiliates don’t pose an “existential threat” to Western societies, and it is laughable to think that they ever could. They arguably don’t pose an “existential threat” to anyone except the people that have unfortunately fallen under their control and possibly their immediate neighbors. At the very least, the threat they pose to us and to other Western nations remains a relatively small and manageable one. The only real “existential threat” that Western nations have faced since WWII was the Soviet Union and their satellites, and in the end the threat from them proved to be a manageable one that the U.S. and its allies successfully faced down and outlasted. ISIS poses a much smaller threat to the U.S. and its allies than the Soviets ever did, and we should not inflate that threat into something that it clearly isn’t. The problem isn’t just that threat inflation is bad analysis (though it is), but that it often leads to reckless and irresponsible policies that aren’t even required to address the danger. Threat inflation prompts us to favor unnecessary and excessive measures here and overseas, and it causes us to obsess over combating certain adversaries to the detriment of other more important interests. Describing something as an “existential threat” is the worst and most irresponsible kind of threat inflation. It is a phrase that ought to be reserved to describe only the most dire threats to our very survival. That doesn’t apply to ISIS or indeed to any terrorist group.

Thank you. But I suspect this is just spitting into the wind. These people deeply desire an "existential" threat so they can justify their free-floating fear of everything and their deep desire for violence to be the silver bullet that will fix it for them. It's primitive human species stuff which civilized leadership from institutions like the church and the government are supposed to mediate. Instead they're stoking it for their own ends.

More rational thought from the Rude Pundit.

Repug Night Terrors

They're looking at the shadow cast on the wall and exaggerating the danger. Every danger.

Political Animal:

I think that Peter Beinart has done a good job of describing the difference between how Republican presidential candidates and President Obama assess the threat from ISIS.

Because the GOP candidates see violent jihadism as a powerful, seductive ideology, they think that many American Muslims are at risk of becoming terrorists, and thus that the United States must monitor them more aggressively. Because Obama sees violent jihadism as ideologically weak and unattractive, he thinks that few American Muslims will embrace it unless the United States makes them feel like enemies in their own country—which is exactly what Donald Trump risks doing.

Obama…believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad. His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).

All the chest-thumping coming from Republicans is based on an elevated assumption of the real threat posed by ISIS. But that’s what happens when the only card you have to play is fear. Behind all the bravado, their message makes America look weak and easily intimidated. President Obama isn’t buying into that for a minute.

Thankful for Alternatives to War

 From Veterans for Peace:

Friday, November 25, 2015 At Thanksgiving, Veterans Call for Return to Nation's Founding Values Fourteen years after the fall of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, Paris, a city beloved by the world, has been dealt deadly blows by fanatical terrorists. It is the worst attack on Paris since World War II. Amid the clamor for revenge, and despite the clear failure of the United States’ so-called war on terror that sparked the destabilization of the Middle East and the rise of ISIL, French President François Hollande has promised a “ruthless” campaign against ISIL, in other words, a war that will be cruel, uncompromising and merciless.  <Full Statement> Download VFP's Suggested Solutions to Confont ISIL which do not include U.S. military action.

Why Doesn't AynRandy Demand Saudi Arabia Fight Its Own Fucking Wars?

If the Tribble-Toupeed One is really the libertarian small-government champion he wants everyone to think he is, why is he so gung-ho for American soldiers to fight and die in the desert to save Saudi Arabia from the Islamic State the Saudis themselves created?

C'mon, Randy: you don't give a shit about how the Saudis treat the sub-humans sometimes known as "women." Your Dominionist buddies would do worse if they thought they could get away with it.

A boycott?  Of what?  The only economic connections the Saudis have with the U.S. are the oil they sell to us and the military hardware they buy.

Military hardware that sits in the desert and disintegrates from non-use because the Saudis don't fight their own wars; they get us to fight and die for them.

Boycotts won't change the Saudis; only being forced to fight their own fucking wars will do that.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called for a boycott of Saudi Arabia on Saturday, saying Americans should shun the kingdom as it did the apartheid regime in South Africa.

"Remember when South Africa was misbehaving? We organized a boycott of South Africa. We should be boycotting Saudi Arabia and not taking money from Saudi Arabia's government," Paul said.

At that time international sanctions were levied against the nation, along with a divestment campaign.

While the senator in his statements did not differentiate a government boycott from one by individuals, a spokesperson later said in a statement that Paul was "not calling for a governmental boycott, but rather options for private citizens and investors."

Repugs Announce They Are Pro-ISIS in 3, 2, 1 ...

From Firedoglake:

- The Islamic State released a video where they executed a Kurdish soldier and threatened to behead President Barack Obama