Obama addresses the nation. Are we feeling reassured?

Are you feeling reassured? Jim Geraghty writes at National Review,

Perhaps the most ominous thing I can say about President Obama’s Sunday-night national address is that he genuinely thinks he’s reassuring a nervous country that just watched ISIS-inspired radicals slip past the much-touted DHS counterterrorism screening with not so much as a peep and kill 14 Americans and injure 21 more.

...At this point in his presidency, Obama speaks with only one tone, the slightly exasperated and sometimes not-merely-slightly exasperated “adult in the room” who constantly has to correct his fellow Americans, who are always flying off the handle, calling for options that “aren’t who we are”, betraying our values, and so on. He’s always so disappointed in us.

...He made yet another pitch for barring anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list from purchasing firearms. He simply ignored any of the objections, whether it’s the lack of due process or judicial review, the arbitrary, foggy nature of how someone gets on the list, or the fact that 280,000 people with no recognized terrorist group affiliation are on the list.

He ominously declared, “This is a matter of national security” . . . yet for some reason, all of those people on the no-fly list and the terror watch list who allegedly represent a national-security threat aren’t being arrested. Earlier yesterday Representative Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at the Department of Homeland Security also “were on the terrorist watch list.”

You know who wasn’t on the no-fly list? The San Bernardino shooters. Nor was the Fort Hood shooter. Nor the Boston bombers. Nor the Chattanooga shooter. In other words, no perpetrator of any major attack on American soil was on the no-fly list.

Yet Obama seemed to think this complete non-sequitur would dispel the national anxiety about his administration’s soporific response to the rise of ISIS and the first attack it inspired on American soil.

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